[Foundation-l] transparency or translucency?

[Robert Rohde]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 8:43 AM, James Rigg
<jamesrigg1974 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I think transparency *is* about making everything public, and that the
> Foundation is merely a semi-transparent organisation, and should at
> least be open about not being a completely open. I don't know enough
> about the Foundation and non-profit law to say whether the Foundation
> could or should be truly transparent, but I do think it is wrong for
> it to trade on the kudos of transparency when it is merely
> semi-transparent. And similarly for the claims I read of it being
> anti-hierarchical.

I think it may be worth drawing a distinction between the Foundation
and the work product.

Wikipedia, for example, engages in radical transparency [1] to a high
degree of approximation.  Every change to every article is recorded
and open for review.  Every discussion about every article is likewise
recorded.  And any individual has the right to question why anything
was done.

I would say that the wiki process strives to be fully transparent.

The Foundation on the other hand is not as open, but it is certainly
more transparent than your average corporation.  Whether one wants to
describe that as "translucent", "semi-transparent", or "transparent"
strikes me as mostly a semantic distinction (i.e. an argument over how
transparent is good enough for each word to apply).

The more important thing to take-away though is that the Foundation
does shoot for a culture of "openness, communication, and
accountability" [2], even if it is not always up to the "radical
transparency" standards that some people would want.

-Robert Rohde

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_transparency
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(behavior)