JOURNAL: Radical transparency to improve resilience

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine and the author of the new book "The Long Tail," is currently exploring the concept of radical transparency and what it means to media companies. I suggested a similar approach in my "Power to the People" article in Fast Company as a means of improving societal resilience:

A newly vigilant and networked public will push for much greater levels of transparency in government and corporate operations, using the Internet to expose, publish, and patch potential security flaws. Over time, this new transparency, and the wider participation it entails, will lead to radical improvements in government and corporate efficiency.

He lists six tactics media organizations can use to improve their transparency and lists the costs and the benefits. Here's some homework. Think about how these tactics can be applied to societal resilience:

• Show who we are.
• Show what we are working on.
• "Process as Content."
• Privilege the crowd.
• Let readers decide what is best (aka: wisdom of the crowd)
• Wikify (this another way of saying: open the storehouse of background information) everything.

Final thought. Within the context of 21st century warfare, moral cohesion and innovation (particularly given open source opponents) have emerged as paramount concerns. Up until now, nation-states have relied on propaganda to mobilize the public for war and maintain the effort. In parallel, black box decision making has been relied upon to produce ongoing improvements in capabilities/technology. However, in this long war, these methods are more of a liability than an asset. Propaganda has proven to be both ineffective and harmful (see my critique: "Propaganda Wars" for more on this) -- and -- black box decision making has yet to yield any meaningful improvements in capabilities. In my view, an update to our decision making process (to take advantage of vastly superior information flows) through radical transparency would be a far superior means of maintaining our moral cohesion and innovation over the long haul.

Comments

[Syn Diesel]

K. Eric Drexler wrote about fact forums 20 years ago, and this might be useful background reading for people new to this idea.

http://www.e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_13.html

He also wrote about the internet as a tool to enable all of this:
http://www.e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_14.html

I read this book at age 17 almost 20 years ago and I wish I had also read a book or two on investing in tech start-up stocks as well. ;)

[Marcello]

"A newly vigilant and networked public will push for much greater levels of transparency in government and corporate operations, using the Internet to expose, publish, and patch potential security flaws."

Frankly I find such vision the product of rosy colored glasses. The public opinion is too ignorant and apathetic to be able to take up that role.
Personally I know my way around a certain range of topics, from military matters to nuclear issues to urban waste management (the last by necessity). Which is not to say that I am a nuclear engineer but for example I knew enough to understand that the noise about the iraqi WMD programs back in 2002 was essentially bullshit.
But when it comes down to something outside my area of expertise, like global warming for example, I have no way to to tell apart bullshit from solid content.
I will have to take what some pundit say at face value, in the same way your typical housewife would have had to do about the iraqi WMD issue.
Essentially buying "black box" manufactured opinions.
While the knowledge may be theoretically easily available neither of us has the time and/or the inclination to learn about it.
I will prefer to spend the available time learning more about the RPG-7 and she will spend her time watching something on TV.
Most of the people will not even go that far. They will work some job divorced from the basics of the modern industrial society and spend the spare time watching entertainment. They are barely qualified to vote in conventional elections, if that.
The processes modern industrial societies rest upon are generally understood only by comparatively small cadres of specialists and aficionados. There is not much to gain from opening the box, if you do not understand the mechanisms inside.

[John Robb]

Marcello, while on its face it appears rosy, in practice (if properly structured) it can produce amazing results. I've seen it work again and again over the last four years. First rule: the best people on any given topic don't work for you. More later.

[Marcello]

It has occurred to me that perhaps it depends on what is meant exactly for "security flaws". If you mean things like internet security, cryptography and stuff like that then, I think you are on the right track.
For things like energy policy and similar issues, I doubt.

[David S.]

In addition to transparency, what is needed is a 'credibility rating' of 'experts'. Over time, those who are consistently wrong will be ignored, and those consistently right will be sought out for their opinion.

For example, if one were to rate an experts statements on Iraqi nuclear WMDs, we would be able to know how much weight to give to what they say about Iran's nuclear WMD capability.

[elberteau]

This is all dependent on a free internet, which is not at all a given. Over the past year there have been motions made to limit the ability of bloggers to participate in unfettered discussion of politics, and lately more politicians and government officials are making statements along the lines of "a free internet is a dangerous thing".

Free exchange of information is a threat to government propaganda efforts, and it would not be a surprise to see a campaign begin in earnest to eliminate it if it continues to grow.

[Syn Diesel]

elberteau, have you even read John's blog? ;)

You can't stop this.

[Syn Diesel]

Ooops, posted too soon. ;/

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/12/13/mccain-war-on-blogs/
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_digbysblog_archive.html#116607297627079797

"First they came for the Child Pornographers, and I did not speak out... "

[cold wolf]

Just as Best Buy was transformed from within, so will the US government be changed, if at all.

When EFFECTIVE* signal/noise filters for online communities are implemented, the true power of the crowd will emerge. Only experts will be able to comment on the issues because everyone else will be filtered away.

The real difficulty lies in making things happen. How do we change an institution with overwhelming, tangible power (police and military) that doesn't want to be changed?

* Transparency may improve efficiency, but efficiency is worthless if it isn't effective--and transparency (especially when coupled with decentralization) increases effectiveness exponentially.

[Syn Diesel]

Yes Cold Wolf, us anymouse interweb peons with clever usernics should be filtered out of teh internet communes. This will make everything better, just the way it was before the interwebs when experts published or perished yet didn't seem to fix the world's problems.

I jest. Comprehensive Knowledge is what is needed, not soft bigoted elitism. The Open Source Free Market cleans it's own mess Cold Wolf, it just needs time, and people working within Time. By posting here, I and other non-experts offer John the opportunity to see a sample of what "real" people think and question. 6 billion people need to "Know" (by proxy) this stuff for it to end in a Good Thing.

His relationship to "experts" should conceivably be done on a mature Hypertext System that operates more like a corporate intranet LAN hooked into a standardised distributed legal-academic library of knowledge.

[scalefree]

As David S points out, we're still missing a critical component of self organization, a widely deployed system of metrics for evaluating the value of knowledge & individuals. Reputation systems along the lines of Google's pagerank or Advogato's trust metric but geared towards aggregating, evaluating & expressing trust within a social network system are a key ingredient in realizing the future John describes. We've got a ways to go before we get there, but I can see the outlines of such systems forming in various places on the Net.

[Okke Ornstein]

Well, I took the challenge and started collecting ideas to implement the Wired ideas in Panama:

http://www.noriegaville.com/?title=radical_transparency_new_ideas_for_good_&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

[Syn Diesel]

Scale Free (nice nic btw) did you read the EOC chapter I posted on Fact Forums?

http://www.e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_13.html

Nobody is saying (John certainly isn't) that such models and fully manifest institutions exist as of today's reality. What we Sentinels simply say is that the potential exists, and it will become manifest eventually. You as an independent citizen/economic actor is what will make it happen.

If not, enjoy being grey goo.

[enigma_foundry]

I would agree that transparency is essential. It is also essential in managing public health emergencies, unfortunately the Bush administration has recently shown that it intends the CIA, not the CDC to be the lead agency in a bio-terrorist event. It is especially concerning that this has been nearly unreported in our press:

See more here:
http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2006/12/23/the-free-press-famines-and-disease-outbreaks/