Tony O'Driscoll

As I have had the good fortune of delving more deeply into what makes a volunteer community such as Fedora tick, my mind keeps wanting to sort out correlation and causality.

Those who participate voluntarily in communities talk about how they value about Openness, Transparency, and Meritocracy. There are no secrets, everything is done in the open. Decisions and Actions are transparent. And if you contribute in a way that the community values your reputational captial within the community grows.

Authenticity is another term that comes up a lot in exploring the special-sauce that fuels the community. Authenticity gets closer to the word TRUTH that we are exploring today. The term that, anecdotally at least, seems to be most ushered when talking to volunteer collaboratives engaged in social production is TRUST.

One of the questions we are trying to get to the bottom of at the Center for IT and Media at Fuqua is what drives what? How do the different factors that community members value load onto a comprehensive "Architecture of Participation" and what is the causal model through which social production is enacted?

Is it that foundational community norms of OPENNESS and TRANSPARENCY force us to be more Truthful or do we all inherently adhere to the belief that "THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE" and the community norms are enabling mechanisms to actualize it.

Right now we are in the process of running the empirical study to try to figure some of this out....... Stay tuned: )

My own hypothesis around this is that truth is foundational and enabling to the other values mentioned here. If you are transparent and open in a mis-truth, chances are that you will end up getting busted. Gamers who "Level Up" and buy characters on auctions rather than grinding through levels to earn their status are quickly found out by fellow Guild members and banished from the Guild.

The article that Ruth mentions above regarding open salaries is another example. I remember in the early days of Web 1.0 seeing a commercial where a young intern hacks the network and sends an e-mail to the whole company sharing everyone's salary. That commercial was designed to create Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) within the HR community and motivate them to pay for more secure systems that stood lesser chance of being hacked. And yet, if the evaluation of a person's contribution is made more inclusive, open and ongoing, the likelihood of a much more honest assessment of the individual's capability and contribution goes up. In each case what seems to underpin things like Openness, Transparency and Meritocracy is the search for the TRUTH.

Those of you familiar with the JoHari window will know that by opening up what is not to others about oneself and by being open to others what is not known to them about themselves is how Trust is built. In both cases this requires truthfulness delivered in an open and transparent way.

Time will tell if my hypothesis bares out....but for now let please let me know my blind spots.

Another thought I had on this topic has to do with something that Ruth mentioned earlier. It has to do with where the boundaries of Openness and Transparency lie.

Traditionally (but less so these days) the biggest organizational boundary was drawn between the company and the customer. More and more the lines between the enterprise and its stakeholders (Customer, Shareholder, Employee, Supplier, Competitor, Complementor etc....) are becoming increasingly porus.

The business ecosystem is becoming more open and the entities within it are more connected than ever! Knowingly or not, when CIOs brought the IP network into their enterprise infrastructures, they began the slow dissolve of the traditional hierarchal structure of the organization.

If you bolt on a technology built as a non-hierarchical communication platform to allow communications across the nation in case of nuclear war, you end up with a technical infrastructure that fundamentally orthogonal to your enterprise decision-making structure. So as the web has enveloped the world and made it flat, so too we have witnessed organizations become flatter and more connected than before.

So this is all good right. The truth sets you free and the Web 2.0 participatory web is dissolving hierarchy at national and industry levels. Push the fast forward button and we will have a billion one person enterprises coalescing around endeavor at the speed of light, doing exactly what they are good and and passionate about and getting paid handsomely for doing so? Not so fast.....someone has to clean the toilet!

Clearly there are solid benefits to openness and transparency within the firm. There were a few articles in "What we're Reading" that pointed to Jack Stack's Open Book Management approach and how it can help employees feel more engaged in the business. So in terms of alignment and orchestration of capability and energy around strategic endeavor there is likely value to be created in openness and transparency.

But what about outside the company? Should GSK open its books to Merck so they can see exactly where they are spending their money and what profit they are making on Malaria vaccines? This is something that Andrew Witty no doubt pondered deeply before making his decision.

What about Apple. Are they closed or open? Closed of course! And that is bad right? ....... Well it looks like the Jury is out. Another article in What We're Reading explores the Apple Paradox: How a Company That's So Closed can Foster So Much Open Innovation.

The central argument of the article is here:

The paradox—and it may be one that goes to the heart of digital-age capitalism—is that Apple’s style of closed innovation results in technology that is so conducive to open innovation.....It’s conceivable, though it’s not very palatable to the “open culture” crowd, that a closed creative process, driven by a guiding genius like Jobs, is the only way to build products as coherent and compelling as the iPhone. I’m sure this would be Jobs’ own argument. After all, without the solid foundation provided by the phone and its core features—the multitouch interface, the camera, the accelerometer, the GPS chip—most iPhone apps would be nothing special.

So when it comes to setting direction and blazing a new trail, the more open and democratic process can bog down the process of taking the bold step to change directions.

Last night in the State of the Union, Obama appeared to be saying the same thing. Why are we waiting? China and India are not waiting to retool their economies....why is America seemingly settling for second best?

In a recent interview with Charlie Rose, Tom Friedman commented on his article "China for a Day" where he suggests if Obama had the ability to make unilateral decision for just one day, and then we went back to the traditional governance process we could likely take the country in a new direction a lot quicker.

So, where does this lead me? I am from Ireland and back during the times of the IRA terrorism we had a saying "If you are not confused, you don't understand." Or as Tom Peters likes to say - "I am more confused than ever, but at a higher level and about more important things".

Inherently, I viscerally believe that the Truth does set you free, but this is based on my own observations around my social interactions with other. Business is not just about social interaction it is also about commercial interests. These two systems share some attributes but vary widely in others. You can cut some corners in business that you can't in life. Staying true to your ethical principles in the Social realm has lost many people their jobs, or worse compromising them has landed many people in jail.

If you are leaving this post with more questions than when you arrived then, according to my definition at least, your knowledge base has expanded. The paradox of knowledge acquisition is that the more we know about a given topic the more we are exposed to how much we don't know.

For now my take on Social Production fueled by an Architecture of Participation model has a valid and valuable place in the overall landscape of how we efficiently coalesce capability round endeavor. It cannot totally replace the Market models of decentralized price or centralized enterprise nor can it replace centralized non-market systems such as non-profit or government, but it CAN make each of them better and that is what this website is all about.