Comments on: Do, or do not. There is no try.

By: James Melzer

James Melzer — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:41:36 +0000

I think one of the things the gov’t struggles with is equity. If they listen to one constituency’s feedback, they have to include everyone to be fair. Including everyone becomes a logistical nightmare and slows the process to a standstill. That’s the risk.

I think your Y!Live meeting is a great case study in this. It was awesome and fun and useful. But it was also three hours long, heavily spammed and not particularly productive. A small cadre meeting in private would have produced more but shared less, so a balance is needed. When should everyone get involved?

It would be appropriate to tailor the method of transparency to the task. This means agreeing on procedures and tools for the BoD and the initiative leads to open up their process. There are places where publishing minutes or letting people listen in make sense – like routine Board meetings. It shares an appropriate amount of information and intimacy without getting in the way of business. But for vision meetings and volunteer-oriented discussions, opening it all the way up might be just fine.

Figuring out the right balance will take some experimentation and trail-and-error. But I agree with you that erring on the side of ‘too open’ is a good idea until a better balance is reached.

By: Livia

Livia — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:52:09 +0000

So James, any thoughts on how we could have a more overt process without too much overhead? That seems challenging and I can appreciate why government goes the other way to produce decisions quickly.

And by not too much I mean, enough that it ensures that transparency is there but not enough to overwhelm us in minutia and administrative overhead.

By: James Melzer

James Melzer — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:46:34 +0000

I wrote that on my phone, so please excuse the typos…

By: James Melzer

James Melzer — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:44:51 +0000

I have a little experience with government, at least US federal gov’t, and its entire governance system is designed with this in mind (although often with the precisely opposite intent). The government keeps detailed records on it’s activities to ensure accountability. As you said, accountability and transparency are very different animals. The government actually throws away deliberative records; that is, they do not expose their decision-making process. I haven’t researched this, but my understaning is this is done for two reasons: 1) simple expedience to produce decisions quickly, and 2) to provide decision-makers with the leeway to hammer out a decision without interests looking over their shoulders every second. Now, on a grand scale with millions of actors that might make sense (politics aside), but on a smaller scale, like IAI with only a few dozen actors, it is a terrible model.

By: Livia

Livia — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 05:28:10 +0000

Just came across the concept of ‘Radical Transparency’ and it seems absolutely relevant to this post. I particularly like this point: “Radical transparency is much more transparent than accountability. It requires decision making to be transparent right from the beginning of the decision making process, while accountability is a process of verifying the quality of decisions or actions after they have been taken. This difference implies that while accountability generally implements some sort of punishment mechanism against individuals or institutions judged to have taken poor quality decisions or actions, after those decisions have been taken or actions carried out, radical transparency encourages corrections and improvements to decisions to be made long before poor quality decisions have the chance to be enacted. Hence, radical transparency potentially helps avoid the need for punishment mechanisms.”