Issue 5 October 2008
The value of transparency in business
Brigid Whoriskey interviews Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer, Sun Microsystems
Simon is the Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, co-ordinating
Sun’s extensive participation in free and open source software communities.
He co-founded Sun’s pioneering staff weblog facility.
bw» how are social dynamics changing and how sP» Transparency is simply the idea that everything
is that driving the trend towards transparency? can be known. In a transparent society I assume that
it’s fine for me to find out, for instance, why my bank
sP» Over the last fifteen years or so we’ve seen the charges are what they are. It is also fine for me to know
internet completely change society and the way people whether garments that I bought are made by child
relate to one another. labour. It’s fine for me to understand how much the
transport of my food contributes to global warming. I
If you look back to the Middle Ages, society was just assume that this type of information will be available
made up of villages where people were in a mesh of and if it’s concealed from me then I will suspect that
relationships. there is malpractice afoot.
The worldwide web has reintroduced the idea of a bw» how open is open? There must be some
mesh back into society where everyone is connected to information that’s confidential or secure. how
everyone else and people are entitled to communicate should organisations strike a balance between
with each other. I can send you an email or visit your openness and confidentiality?
website and I don’t have to find an intermediary to ask
for permission to communicate with you. That all leads sP» In a transparent society there will always be
to the assumption that everything is open or transparent some information that is private. Secrecy is seen as bad
and you need to have a reason to conceal things. but privacy is seen as good. So there is an expectation
of privacy in the way that a business conducts itself
bw» what do you mean by the terms with a consumer. However there would not be an
‘transparency’ and ‘openness’? expectation of secrecy. Secrecy implies keeping things
out of view simply for the sake of it whereas privacy
implies protecting the rights of individuals.
14 | Perspectives on the future
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