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.

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.

You can’t handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls.

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.

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.