Speaking of radical transparency...

I read first on Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz's blog that he and Quinn Norton are going to be geo-trackable in realtime as they cover a hacker convention:

"This year's Chaos Communication Congress opens with a unique opportunity -- your chance to track the movements of a Wired News' reporter on the scene, as well as nearly a thousand other visitors to the annual hacker convention.

[...]

track Quinn Norton (ID 254135) and Wired Digital's Aaron Swartz (ID 254260), two of nearly 1,000 participants wearing RFID trackers for the duration of the congress.

(Quinn Norton, Hacker Con Submits to Spychips, Wired News, December 28, 2006)

Swartz, who is now a Wired employee thanks to our acquisition of Reddit, adds: "It's funny--the first time my employers find out where I am this week may be when they report it on their own news site." Which may in fact be true--like many email/IM based companies these days, we increasingly don't care where people work as long as they're Treo/Blackberry reachable and responsive. Or just update their blog frequently ;-) 

Our competitors are invited to spend a lot of time writing geotracking scripts to see who our two intrepid reporters are interviewing.

Comments

[The-Ignorant]

Hey, reading this blog for the first time. I must say it is as insightful as the book

[بيت]

thanks...

http://www.alragib.com/
http://www.alragib.com/games/

[Sheila]

Very beautiful blog.

[Batteries]

I don't think it's the "second-best" solution, but rather something we consider a one-size-fits all approach, while we sometimes make the mistake and forget that radical transparency works only in environments that are already prone to be transparent in the first place. That's also why most of the modern governance frameworks we ponder about are derived from such environments as the open source software community, these are highly transparent, collaborative and democratic microcosms, whereas the evironments we WISH would employ radical transparency would quickly get into lots of trouble, such as national security (do we want those torture memos on the web?) or corporate decision making (do you really want to know why you were fired?) etc... I think radical transparency is too often a stretch goal, and as such it's not too shabby I'd say, yet it's implementation is where we should work on. if we can achieve more democractic accountability with only half the transparency we aim at, we might not even need the radical version of it. transparency can't be an end in itself, it's a means. if we confuse the two, we end up focusing on creating more and more transparency without gaining the ability to do reach something with it.