Of fads and sunlight

I was really pleasantly surprised and quite encouraged to find that my commitment to and enthusiasm for transparency didn’t wane a bit on further study. In fact, I feel positively academic in saying that I think I’m really better able to articulate now how transparency can make a difference, and the circumstances under which it can really work. And I think that a lot of this discussion has real relevance for nonprofit organizations, which were really foremost in my mind in my earlier post, for how we practice real empowerment rather than its facade.

Basically, the key point is that information alone, out of context and in a way that people can’t possibly derive real meaning from it, isn’t a transparency that will bring real action or provide any real access to power. For transparency to make an impact, information has to suggest how change would and should be made: knowing who’s responsible for making a certain decision, for example, is more helpful than having a lot of raw financial data that’s hard to make sense of. Transparency is at its best when it changes conversations, enabling people to ask informed questions that they wouldn’t otherwise ask, and shifting the balance of power.

And a point that didn’t really come up explicitly at all in this back and forth, but which seems paramount to me, is that, without organizing to create a value consensus and to mobilize people to view data through a shared critical lens, additional information will not likely result in any tangible changes. I mean, to suggest otherwise is to assume that we’re all on the same page about what our goals should be, and that once we have the right information we’ll fall into step. That’s obviously not today’s landscape at all.

Finally, and this was part of the conversation that I had with the former student, there’s the danger that transparency can turn people off, because the truth is that sometimes our organizations, and certainly our government, are kind of ugly and messy…and sometimes we’d rather that people not see them. And this, of course, isn’t an argument against transparency at all, but a reminder that energy spent hiding what we’re really doing (or not) from stakeholders who have a right to know it is energy that we’re not spending changing our society and improving people’s lives.

I know that I parent better if I pretend that someone else is watching. I’m less likely to check my email just one more time, to pick up Atlantic Monthly instead of playing Legos, to ask my daughter to “please just knock it off”. And so I have hope that transparency can do the same for our government, civic institutions, and even our social welfare organizations–inspiring us to right action–and even more, giving people some of the tools they need to fix what it is that they see and don’t like.

But it won’t happen automatically, or blindly, or because ‘transparency’ is the new buzzword.

Knowledge, quite honestly, isn’t power. Power is power. It’s with power that the kind of knowledge that transparency can put in people’s hands that the real transformation can happen. And that is what brings the promise of a sunnier tomorrow.