There’s lots of chat about things needing to be ‘transparent’ at the moment – it’s all wrapped up in the ‘web2′ thing, which is stretching across to the ‘enterprise2′ thing. My angle on public/private/personal/political links to it, but is from an emotional source.
Now I’m no educated pundit on this area, but I was in conversation with a charming chap recently and we circled this issue and came to a point (or I did in my head anyway).
Sometimes when people say ‘transparent’ what they really want is ‘accountable’.
We are prepared to trust in decisions (assuming we are working from a ‘community’ basis rather than ‘networked individualism’), and don’t need to actually watch them being made. But we do want to know that if we have valid reason, we should be able to see why and how the decisions were made.
For example: You are all welcome to come to my local allotment association’s AGM tomorrow. We will discuss the intricacies of where we source our supplier of organic manure, who mans the shop on what days, and which plots are available to newcomers and why, what the money situation is, etc. Decisions will come from this, but I bet you don’t want to sit through it, as would many of the allotmenteers. But they do have a right, as part of an association, to know if they want to…
Which makes me wonder – with all this ‘if it doesn’t work, throw it out’ social software culture, how can we have accountability? Are all these cool new collaboration technology mash-ups generating an accountable decision trail?
Ed,
it’s all about ‘Just doing it’
Accountability is sooooo 1.0 
In all seriousness, a lot of web 2.0 links to ‘openness’ are about openness in institutions- that you can see the decision making processes and in some cases play a part in it.
These concepts of openness, accountability, transparency and involvement are all very different.
I remember when I was working with Demos and we were discussing the idea of opening up all their research. There was just too much stuff there. Openness there didn’t mean transparency, it actually meant being able to editorialize their research, reformat it into a publicly consumable output.
When people call for openness or transparency they usually want easily digestible material, and for many organisations that is just not feasible. There is the overhead of producing material that, but also, more importantly, the historicity of various processes (you have to go through it, not just look at the final results).
I’m reminded of the Few Good Men quote.
And we do live in a world of walls, organizations – and even open, accountable or transparent have walls. The walls are not there to protect secrets, these walls represent the effort that is required to get involved.
This is interesting. A short set of reflections in response:
There do seem to be layers to transparency and accountability that we need to unpack and focus on.
There is ‘live’ transparency – which generates a lot of information about hopefully means all parties can be well informed for present decision making if they want to take the time to engage (E.g. To stretch your example somewhat – live-blogging, video-casting and twittering the allotment AGM so that those who can’t make it can jump in if they want, or know the details of a particular decision the day after).
Then there is longer term transparency, where I don’t want to wade through recordings of everything that happened at every allotment AGM for the last 5 years, but I might want to see when key decisions were made and who by. If the archive of key decisions is split up across the social web, captured to different depths, in 15 different tools, 1/2 of which have gone bust and no longer hold the information I need – then we have got a problem for accountability.
But in any case, even if we hadn’t ‘thrown out’ all our different experimental captured transparent logs of the meetings – there would still be too much to wade through.
So – for accountability I do seem to need a digested summary of decisions, transparently made available in a coherent narrative – and securely archived so the decision trail won’t be lost. If the decision trail can link off to deeper data from our ‘live transparency’ elsewhere on the social web, all the better – but where accountability is needed – there does seem to be a need for a central hub to hold it together and keep it clear and consistent.