My friend Patrick Masson has started an EDUCAUSE wiki page to develop a working definition of “openness”. I’m going to sidestep the hot debate around that topic and focus instead on the distinction he makes between openness and transparency, which he defines as “provid[ing] the stakeholder community access to–and perhaps even a platform to inform–the reasoning, debate, considerations, outcomes, etc. that affected an authority’s organizational, operational or strategic decision, whereas openness shifts authority for decisions to the stakeholder community.”
Transparency is a highly underrated virtue that often gets lost in conversations about openness. If you have the theoretical right to influence the direction of an open project, but you can’t practically exercise that right because you don’t know what the heck is going on (never mind why it is going on), then the value of openness to you is diminished greatly. Transparency is also vitally important for people and institutions that don’t care that much about open source per se but want to minimize their risks in adopting a product, whether it is open or not.
It turns out that meaningful transparency his hard to achieve, particularly in an open source community, where decisions are communal and distributed. You can’t expect everyone to have the time, knowledge, or skill to follow the listserv discussions closely (assuming that all the important conversations are happening on the listservs and not in chat or face-to-face), understand the context of the conversations, and follow all the implications. I think that’s one reason why some people get nervous when they consider adopting open source software. It’s very hard for them to understand how the software actually gets produced. And if they can’t understand it, then they can’t really trust it either.
Open source projects can be organized in a wide variety of ways. In Sakai, the community has a dues-supported foundation that facilitates the collaboration among the participants and generally tries to make the work going on in the community as visible and comprehensible as possible. What follows here are some suggestions for the Sakai-curious—as well as current members of the Sakai community who may feel like they’re a little bit out of touch with what’s going on—about how to better understand what the Sakai Foundation and community are up to.