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In Designing systems for transparency robustness - Joi Ito's Web
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http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2011/09/05/designing-syste.htmlDesigning systems for transparency robustness »
Joi
Sep 05, 2011 - 04:58 UTC »
I've had some interesting conversations
about the role of transparency and privacy and I
have an opinion about this. I think that we have a
world where those in power have secrecy and
citizen are forced to be transparent. I think that
modern technology has made this increasingly so. I
think that fundamentally, it should be the
opposite. Public figures and institutions in power
should be forced to be transparent and private
citizen should have privacy and the right to speak
without fear of retribution or persecution. I
think this is essential for democracy and open
society and we need to push for and enable this to
happen.
As we work on this process of making the powerful
transparent, we run into some difficulties because
most institutions, even those that are for the
most part well-meaning and good, are not robust
against transparency because they haven't been
designed to be transparent.
It reminds me of software projects that try to "go
open source" after they've been written. It's
often nearly impossible because the code is a
mess. When people write software to be open, they
typically write it in a way that is understandable
to the outside and isn't embarrassing. For
instance, I know some developers who use obscene
words for their variables or vent their
frustration about their love life in the comments
in their code. They'd lose their jobs or their
spouses if their code was suddenly "open".
In most powerful institutions, corners are cut and
methods are used in a somewhat "ends justify the
means" sort of way. There are a lot of things that
are done and said behind closed doors that
wouldn't survive public scrutiny, but have become
common practice. In many cases, these practices
aren't necessarily critically wrong, but just
embarrassing or politically incorrect in some way.
I believe that Wikileaks is just the beginning of
a bigger trend where it will become harder and
harder to hide information and citizen
counter-surveillance will become a norm rather
than an exception.
I think that this will cause a lot of pain to
powerful institutions - some will be overthrown or
crushed. However, I think that we can build
institutions that are robust against transparency
if we design them that way from the beginning. It
will be harder than learning to write open source
software, but I believe that in the end we'll have
a society that is better, stronger, more effective
and fair.
--
Karl Dubost
Montréal, QC, Canada
http://www.la-grange.net/karl/
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