Transparency

Overview

Transparency refers to the idea that social and political processes should be both visible and accountable, in order to minimize error. It is one of the mechanisms whereby public error correction can take place.

Related Articles

• Transparency is a policy which allows and encourages public error correction
• Transparency is one of the key ideas of modernism.
• CITOKATE (Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error) is an acronymic expression of the basic idea of transparency
• Security techniques can be more transparent and hence less of a threat to civil liberty if they are bi-directional, i.e. when the targets of surveillance are permitted access to the same surveillance tools and records.
  • The "looking back" (or "watching the watchers") part of this concept is called sousveillance.

Related Concepts

• The software development maxim "many eyeballs make all bugs shallow" (Linus's law) is essentially applying transparency to the field of software development.
• The Open Business Model is an application of transparency to the business world.

Links

Reference

• Wikipedia (Transparency (humanities))

Filed Links

version 3

• 2011-07-13 [L..T] Kenya opens its books in revolutionary transparency drive

version 2

• 2011-04-28 [Talk|Index] Obama Administration punishes reporter for using multimedia § “White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area” for filming protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser.”
• 2009-04-23 [Talk|Index] Transparency is Bunk § “In short, the generous impulses behind transparency sites end up doing more harm than good.”
• 2009-03-12 [Talk|Index] Obama Administration Declares Proposed IP Treaty a 'National Security' Secret § “The White House this week declared (.pdf) the text of the proposed treaty a "properly classified" national security secret, in rejecting a Freedom of Information Act request by Knowledge Ecology International.”
• 2008-03-11 [Talk|Index] GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com § [2]“A new web service that lets users rate and comment on the uniformed police officers in their community is scrambling to restore service Tuesday, after hosting company GoDaddy unceremonious[ly] pulled the plug on the site in the wake of outrage from criticism-leery cops.”
• 2008-01-04 [Talk|Index] See Everything Your Friends And Neighbors Have Ever Bought At Sears § [2]“Apparently, all you need to do is create an account at www.managemyhome.com, click "Find Sears Products" and enter a name, address and phone number.” ...I dunno, I think that sounds rather cool. Scenarios in which this could be abused, anyone? -{{woozle.init
• 2007-11-14 [Talk|Index] Sensitive Guantánamo Bay Manual Leaked Through Wiki Site § [2]"The Camp Delta document includes schematics of the camp, detailed checklists of what "comfort items" such as extra toilet paper can be given to detainees as rewards, six pages of instructions on how to process new detainees, instructions on how to psychologically manipulate prisoners, and rules for dealing with hunger strikes."
• 2006-09-26 [Talk|Index] Obama's First Law Known As 'Google For Government' § [2]“The new law provides Americans with a new website, what Obama calls a "Google for government." Eventually, anyone will be able to type in a few key words and learn details of where federal tax dollars go, and perhaps whether those trillions are being spent wisely or foolishly.”
• 2006-07-11 [Talk|Index] Officers arrest men for videotaping them § “On the day that Terri Schiavo died – victim of a court order condemning the brain-damaged woman to death by thirst and starvation – Representative Tom DeLay of Texas did what few politicians have the courage to do these days. He spoke his mind.”

[refresh]

Projects

• FreeNet: free anonymized distributed network within the internet; requires app installation (runs on Java)
• WikiLeaks: a site for principled document leaking and analysis.
  • 2007-11-14 Sensitive Guantánamo Bay Manual Leaked Through Wiki Site: "The disclosure highlights the internet's usefulness to whistle-blowers in anonymously propagating documents the government and others would rather conceal. The Pentagon has been resisting -- since October 2003 -- a Freedom of Information Act request from the American Civil Liberties Union seeking the very same document."
  • 2007-01-11 was still under construction: "We have received over 1.1 million documents so far."
    • discussion: slashdot (there appears to be some genuine concern that the site is mostly a scam to attract investment capital)
• Witness: "international human rights organization that provides training and support to local groups to use video in their human rights advocacy campaigns."

Essays

• A Parable about Openness by David Brin

News

• 2007-08-17 Liberties Advocates Fear Abuse of Satellite Images
  • A poster on Contrary Brin said: "Dr. Brin's answer would of course be transparency: make the spy results public domain and freely accessible, so that you KNOW what the government is seeing. But how would it work? If we post spy satellite results, everyone can work out what the spysat capabilities are. And how do we know that every spysat picture taken of US soil is being deposited? And yet if we do not demand transparency, further use of spysats for nefarious purposes is inevitable. How can we untangle this web?"
• 2007-01-07 Cell phone videos transforming TV news
• 2006-11-12 What's so unusual about this?: public school science teacher in Kearny, NJ, is caught on tape "teaching" fundamentalism in science class
  • The voice of David Paszkiewicz: the recording, with partial transcripts and much discussion
  • 2007-02-01 Student’s Recording of Teacher’s Views Leads to a Ban on Taping: rather than encouraging this obviously effective quality-control technique, the school board bans taping without the teacher's permission (also making it more difficult to take accurate class notes) and requires all teachers to undergo training on the separation of church and state. These moves seem finely calculated to get everyone ticked off at the student and deflect attention away from the teacher.