How open must openness be? Is absolute openness always good? These are questions I’ve been struggling with for some time now.
Many of us, especially in virtual worlds and social media, have a tendency to celebrate sharing, openness and reaching out. The reality of everyday internet life is often more challenging: there is griefing and spamming, indifference and fickle engagement, lurking and passivity, a refusal to learn or outright idiocy.
Of course, there are also the many wonderful stories of great things which happen when people, institutions, companies en organizations open up.
Still, even while being fundamentally welcoming, it seems many organizations or ventures offer more limited versions of openness in order to enhance the quality of their communities.
Sometimes this happens in a subtle way. Second Life for instance is limited in the number of participants sharing the same virtual space, and combining this with interesting discussions and a very civil group culture, Metanomics and We Are the Network (there are many other examples) succeed in creating a high quality environment.
Others are more outspoken in their access management. I described the Long Room forums of Alphaville, the markets blog of the Financial Times. In order to get access (which is free) one needs to write an application and be part of the financial community at large.
Another example could be the venerable forums of The Well, where no application is needed but where a modest fee has to be paid (it should be noted that the current owner of The Well, Salon.com, is not doing well financially speaking).
The Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Course (CCK09) itself is a platform which is generally in favor of openness and transparency, it is a free course but registration is needed. Registration may seem like a very small hurdle to take, but as all website managers know, it can have a dramatic impact on both the quantity as the quality of participants.
There is another issue which is related with openness: transparency. If I remember it well, when I explained the possible advantages of walled gardens, Stephen Downes (who facilitates CCK09 together with George Siemens) objected to the lack of transparency of such projects – but maybe even transparency is not always totally desirable.
Interestingly enough, Lawrence Lessig warns in The New Republic for the perils of openness in government (in Against Transparency). His arguments are complex and subtle so one really should read the lenghty article, but he warns for the populism and the jumping-to-conclusions mentality which could deepen because of “too much” transparency in government matters.
Another related subject is that of “forgetting” and I just refer here to Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s new book, ‘Delete – The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age’ and the discussion Mayer-Schönberger had with Metanomics host and Professor Robert Bloomberg. What should we think about a world in which all our electronically mediated communications get archived and where it is often impossible to get them deleted? Should we rejoice because of that staggering level of transparency, or fear the consequences of having to express ourselves in constant fear of saying or doing something which could eventually be used against us?
I do admit these themes are more like a network of connected issues, not one single big theme. Nevertheless I’d like to get some input here about openness and transparency in the age of ubquitous computing and communications…So feel free to react and comment!
Roland Legrand