Write post on why we chose Pledge over certified membership

[timothyfcook]

Prompted by this:

I love the idea of @opencompanyorg but in a world where "open" and "pledge" are weasel words the "initiative" seems to have no teeth.

— Michael F. Lamb (@datagrok) January 26, 2014

[datagrok]

I'm sure I'm not the only one suspicious of pledges made by companies with no metrics for self-evaluation, and no penalties if they should violate their pledge.

Claims like "don't be evil" and (though it is a government, not a company) "the most transparent administration in history" come to mind.

I can easily imagine a company taking the pledge and being behind it 100% until one year their revenue dips and they rationalize "maximize openness" to mean "maximum openness is currently 0% in these hard economic times" or something like that.

"Open" without a strong definition reminds me of both the conflict between the Free Software and the Open Source initiatives, as well as some proprietary software companies' "open source" policies which carry almost as many restrictions on use and re-use of code as their closed-source code. (I'm not taking a position about Free Software here; I'm saying that the interpretation of a word by motivated parties can vary wildly.)

If we have to rely entirely on the court of public opinion to evaluate how well these companies are meeting their pledge, and have to carefully investigate what specifically is meant by each company's interpretation of their pledge, okay, but... we the public have to do that anyway. What's the Initiative for? What are my gittips supporting?

@timothyfcook mentioned on twitter that @opencompany is hiring journalists, presumably to keep its member companies honest. If (and this admittedly is a lot of speculation from half a tweet worth of information) the journalists' wages are supported by the membership dues paid by the companies they've been tasked to evaluate, that seems like it could be a disincentive to honest, critical evaluation.

I'd like to reiterate that I'm a fan of the idea and motivation behind the OpenCompany Initiative. I wish you the best of luck in your efforts. The examples of open companies that I've heard about already like Balanced Payments are inspiring and motivating. (At least they are today, under the current management, with the current team, before they get acquired by some evil corporate monstrosity, before they start bleeding money and have to "pivot...")

I'd be delighted if your responses to some of these comments in your blog post make me less skeptical of the Initiative's effectiveness and purpose, and encourage other initially-skeptical people to get behind the effort.

[chadwhitacre]

@datagrok Check out our first post here, especially the final three paragraphs:

So, what’s the limit on openness?

At the moment Tamizi declines to give me any kind of stats in terms of where they are in revenue and how many people are using the platform daily (though they have been public with other stats). When pressed as to why, he said, “We just don’t.” It seems like an odd distinction given their openness on everything else. There are of course obvious protections around processes to guard against fraud, being a payment company after all.

Whether they’ll share revenue and sensitive company statistics down the line remains to be seen. After all, in Tamizi’s own words: “Continually challenging why we shouldn’t share something is part of our process. It’s part of what being open is about.”

Check out the doc where we wrote this (#75):

https://docs.google.com/a/norg.com.au/document/d/1F9HZ3NDH2iA9BvGboYaD0frNhRjqaZDU06o3MsfhB64/

In the comments you'll find that I asked @bronwenc to not pull punches at the end. I can't see the chat history on the doc now (as opposed to the comments) but @jkwade actually showed up and watched while we were doing this editing.

If we have to rely entirely on the court of public opinion to evaluate how well these companies are meeting their pledge, and have to carefully investigate what specifically is meant by each company's interpretation of their pledge, okay, but... we the public have to do that anyway.

Ultimately, yes. You're right. That's why efforts around certification and legal definitions are not enough.

What's the Initiative for?

The point of the initiative is for companies to advertise their readiness to be grilled. A company that is part of the OCI is inviting you to critique them.

What are my gittips supporting?

Journalism and website infrastructure, primarily.

If the journalists' wages are supported by the membership dues paid by the companies they've been tasked to evaluate, that seems like it could be a disincentive to honest, critical evaluation.

The twist is that, on Gittip, we don't see exactly who is giving what to the OCI. The conjecture is that this constraint will enable our journalistic side to preserve editorial independence.

[chadwhitacre]

I've labelled this a Story Idea.