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

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.