Transparency¶

Hand in hand with collaboration is our belief in transparency. Though we do have to limit our collaborations, since time is finite, we try to make all of our actions, ideas and decisions as open as possible. This way anyone can position themselves for future collaboration, since all information about our direction is open. The core reason we can do this is we believe that ‘ideas are cheap’ - that the real value is in the ability to execute. And if someone else can execute better than we can then we want to collaborate with them. We have experienced many real advantages in being as transparent as possible, and very few real downsides. We are practical about it, but a pragmatism of questioning why so many companies default things to ‘closed’ has lead to some real advantages to being transparent.

• We strive to always make our work available to all - open source licenses for code, open bug trackers and development lists, creative commons for workshops and documentation, recordings of workshops and talks available online, etc. This enables anyone to instantly track the work we’re doing every day.
• Our pricing is listed directly on our website. We don’t believe in making people call where a salesperson can tweak the price on the fly to make the most money off of them. This helps people trust us, and know that we’re not looking to fleece them.
• As a 501c3 our tax filing every year is open to all. In the future we hope to get even better about being open about our costs.
• The team and priorities lists where we coordinate what everyone is working on are public, so anyone can see in a given week what we are up to.
• We never hide our strategic directions, our always open about what we’re working on now and hope to work on next. Periodically we work on roadmaps that we publish online, though these unfortunately often fall out of date. But we never hide what we know we’ll be working on, or what we want to work on.
• We never require a Non-Disclosure Agreement for any thing we do, and we even try to avoid signing them when others ask. Our goal is to at least get people to question if they really need it, and if there are good reasons we will sign them. [1]

We would like to be even better, to not just have a firehose of information, but nice dashboards where anyone can easily track all that we’re doing. Or at least do more summaries on the blog and newsletter of decisions we take. But we hold transparency as a core value, and try to set up our systems to be as naturally open as possible, without requiring additional work on our end. We’ve seen concrete advantages to this - we can test our hunches early and often, people can improve and fix our source code before releases, and it’s easier for people to trust us and feel good about where their money is going.

Increasing transparency in the world is one of the main goals of our software. We very much believe that more transparency from the institutions that rule our lives will enable a wider group of people to collaborate in solving the problems that plague us. Though we hold ourselves to high standards of transparency, and we very much believe that more transparency in the world will ultimately help, our method of helping increase transparency is most always a ‘carrot’ approach, as opposed to the ‘stick’ of legislation and forcing people to be open. Our goal is to make the best possible product that people will want to move to because it makes their lives easier. And we always build openness in to it by default, to make it so it can be open when they decide they are ready. But our focus is on the tools that make transparency easier, with open standards and connecting to legacy databases to open those. Those who work with the ‘stick’ are often allies of ours, and are incredibly important, but our chosen way of working is to build great tools that encourage openness, transparency and enable collaboration and participation.

The core reason for this is a belief that there’s a limit to the amount of openness you can legislate and require of people. Though we are not as negative on the transparency movement as Lawrence Lessig a lot of what he says resonates [2]. The whole structure of government needs change - opening up everything will just make a whole lot of people defensive. Much of the reason many are not doing the best thing isn’t because they’re not constantly exposed, it’s because they lack the appropriate resources and tools to do the job right. So our goal is to have our tools be used, and have them always show the benefits of transparency. We need to think about what the ‘win’ is, what actually improves for government, what wasn’t possible before. Helping root out corruption is certainly a really great thing, but there needs to be a next system that actually works better. If we can truly figure out collaboration and participation with government, so that opening up allows citizens to contribute in a way that helps the bureaucrats who run things day to day, then we’ll be in the right direction. Obviously it’s going to take push and pull, carrot and stick, but organizationally OpenGeo falls almost completely on the side of the carrot, as we just don’t enjoy beating people with sticks.

Footnotes

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