Now, I’m optimistically confident that managers do not go to work with the intention of disengaging their workforce, however, if you can relate to any of the statements below it may be time to review your practises.

5 Ways to Disengage your Workforce:

1. Block the internet

Can your access all the sites you need to effectively achieve your daily tasks?
And no, I don’t just mean social networks, I mean internet access overall.

2. Mandate the use of antiquated systems

What version of internet browser (assuming you have internet access) are you using?
Are all your software applications compatible? Within and outside your organisation? (Or are you constantly having to ask clients and suppliers to change the format of files?)
Do you have to login with a different username and password for each system?
Are you frustrated by the software functionality available to you?

3. Rely on email as your primary communication tool

My fondness for email as an effective core communication tool is well known – I’ll say no more here.

4. It’s on the intranet

Another favourite – and as the saying goes: “the intranet is where documents go to die” – that is unless you have a recently implemented social intranet – then you can ignore this statement because you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for, or easily ask your colleagues in an open and easy to access format.

5. Have no social spaces

No, I don’t mean physical spaces, like a lunch room – I mean online social spaces, behind a firewall, where people can engage with their colleagues, where expertise location is simple, where sharing knowledge and resources is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and people feel better connected to each other across departments, across locations, across countries.
But then, they’re supposed to be working – not socialising, aren’t they?!!

But that was only because I sat too close to the screen and the constant camera panning and zooming made me ill.

If you have a job in marketing or advertising, or work in media and entertainment, you already know the message at the base level of this film. Corporate dollars make things happen, in more ways than most consumers realize.

Go a little deeper and you may conclude what Oscar Wilde wrote over a century ago: “there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Many of the brands participating the film seem to have selected this route, e.g. Ban deodorant as a challenger brand.

However, pay close attention and you’ll end up at the question at the heart of the film’s inquiry: what is true brand transparency? Perhaps for one or two of the film’s sponsors, participation declares their commitment to this ideal. The scenes with POM’s Resnick are illustrative of this.

The essence of Spurlock’s message is contained in this TED talk:

But what does transparency mean for you? Will you open a truly objective ear to both brand praise and criticism? Can you promote your brand with whole, not half, truths? Do you espouse the same ideals as your brand’s public positioning and if not, will you resign?

I believe that there’s a social business message in Spurlock’s story. It’s about connections, culture, content, and clarity. For some brands, the thought of being on screen in a capacity that transparent is clearly enough to drive corporate nausea.

In the Social Media Marketing channel we were wooed by the new viral celebrity Isaiah Mustafa (@isaiahmustafa) in the role of Old Spice Man (@oldspice) delivered in the Old Spice brand campaign. This campaign bridged the connection to us in the social webs by connecting social media celebrities and influencers to the Old Spice brand. Brands are popular in social media but celebrities are HOT. Celebrities in social media share personality, are personal and thus popular – Musicians and Actors top the Facebook Pages rankings over brands. The Old Spice Man brought that personality to the campaign through near real-time YouTube video and Twitter replies to the questions that he invited us to ask. Engaging the community is the aspiration of all brands. Engaging with the community with personality is a rarer capability. The Old Spice campaign delivered on the brand promise through the well integrated creative, social and marketing teams to create, listen and respond to both social celebrities, influencers and the masses.

Brand Lessons Learned:

• Collaboration is essential to campaign and community management. Does your Social Media Servicing team have a view into your Social Media Marketing or Communications calendars? Are you anticipating responses to your messaging? Do you have a knowledge map of your organization to workflow your community communication?
• Community is forever, campaigns are transient. An integrated social media team is essential to deliver on both. Do your teams have access to the tools and information necessary to make decisions? Do they have the ability to listen, respond and measure?

In the Social Media Servicing channel we learned about the career transition of Frank Eliason (@FrankEliason) from Comcast. Frank and the cast on the Customer Service Team that emerged under the Twitter handle @ComcastCares. Over the past three years Frank and team have earned top mention on every Social Media Servicing case study. He and this passionate crew innovated the Social Media Servicing model by adding Twitter to their customer listening toolbox. Under this decentralized social media servicing model emerged @ComcastBill, @ComcastSteve, @ComcastDete, @ComcastMelissa, @ComcastBonnie, @ComcastSherri. These personalities were able to attract in some cases, larger Twitter followings than the brand they work for @Comcast. The service relationship they earned with the communities they interacted with are largely to attribute to this elective community behavior. In contrast, my experience as a Social Media Marketing Manager and Community Manager (@CocaCola), our community engagement was centralized. We engaged the community as the Coke bottle and with a tease of attribution to our personality through our CoTags or ^PF. This tweet signature helped to humanize the interaction with our community while maintaining brand identity and growing a centralized community. Brands that engaged and mature in social media face the challenge of social media identity management. As social media teams and channels grow so do the decisions brands must make to balance their identity and personalities that support them.

Identity Lessons Learned:

• Centralized communities build larger communities. Have you enabled an enterprise social media publishing and community management capability to support this approach? How are you able to publish, listen and respond with a large social media service team?
• Decentralized communities enable your brand knowledge to independently scale. Do you have a social media policy, certification and identity guidelines to support your social workforce? Can you aggregate your distributed conversations to facilitate a common social brand channel?

Managing your social media brand, supporting personalities and policy for social media identity are lessons being learned first by the largest brands and communities. As your Social Media Marketing and Servicing channels mature with resources and community expectations, so must your approach to the medium to find the balance right for your brand.

A couple of weeks ago, there was an article about @GovernorRod’s intention to live-tweet his corruption trial. Were Blagojevich’s tweets appropriate given the fact that he was in a federal courtroom facing 24 counts of corruption? Most people would agree that there are inappropriate times and topics to tweet. A high-profile, federal trial is definitely one of them.

Analogously, how appropriate is it to tweet or update your Facebook status while you’re in a meeting or an interview ? Or checking into a client’s office on Foursquare before the public knows that they’re your client?

A number of companies, Coca-Cola and IBM to name a few, have already put corporate social policies in place to avoid potentially embarrassing situations. As companies and their employees become increasingly social, brands must balance the essence of social (openness, sharing, and transparency) with the realities of business (information security, risk management, and legal).  Corporations with policies in place will be better prepared than those that have yet to address the issue.

Does your company provide meaningful guidance in relation to the use of social tools?

Lane Becker, President of GetSatisfaction, gave a presentation at Dachis Group’s Social Business Summit on how enterprises need to re-organize to grapple with this phenomenon. His solution? Recognize that a corporation is not separate and distinct from its customers, prospects and employees, but rather is a networked creature composed of all these stakeholders. In essence, your company is a bunch of nodes in the network.

Suspend disbelief for a moment and swallow this definition wholly. What are the ramifications? If you can accept that the chief difference between your employees and customers is that some get paid to discuss your product, then it isn’t much of a logical leap to start grabbing and internalizing anything of value that your customers and prospects are willing to give you.

In his presentation Lane outlined a series of principles aimed at helping companies wrap their mind around this change:

• Control to Cacophony – Companies move slower than technological change happens. Failing repeatedly (or put a nicer way “iteration”) is the only way to change quickly enough to keep up.
• Less Hierarchy – Don’t get rid of all hierarchy, but empower your employees to improvise based on the signals they receive from your internal and external networks.
• Prevention to Recovery – Rather than preventing negative outcomes, embed the capacity to recover quickly from failure. Empowered employees will fail. Build the capacity to apologize, learn and move on.
• Walls to Windows – Create transparency at the edges of your business – this means letting your network know who owns what aspect of their favorite (or most hated) product. Give them access to that person.
• Ownership to Stewardship – Understand that you probably shouldn’t be in charge of every aspect of your products. Don’t try to move the customers away from where they want to be and embrace where they are.

Some of these principles are more easily executed than others, but the overarching theme is the same – if you aren’t fully utilizing your ecosystem, then you are leaving value on the table.

What do you think? Is your company still duplicating functions that your network would give you for free?

Privacy concerns seem to be constantly in the news, like the recent furor about ‘full body scanners’ being deployed in airports to peer below our clothes as a response to the Abdulmutallab bomb attempt, or the spasm of concerns following the recent demo of TAT’s Recognizr augmented reality application that can determine the identity of people from cell phone pictures or video streams based on public domain photos.

The Western concept of our rights of privacy boil down to the right to conceal information about ourselves, as in the privacy of our homes, or the skin below our clothes. It is tied very tightly to our sharing of physical space, and the mores and laws that arbitrate the rights of the individual to conceal information from others and the rights of the state to demand and access information about us for public order.

It is generally illegal in the US to wear a mask or other face covering that would conceal identity. In Virginia, for example, it is a class 6 felony. A man in West Virginia was arrested for wearing a Grinch mask, a few years ago. When told by a policeman that it was illegal, he stated that he didn’t believe it, and refused to remove the mask, leading to his arrest.

Consider that in other cultures, covering of the face is required by religious and tribal laws. Women in much of the Muslim world wear various sorts of face coverings, some that completely conceal the face. Berber men cover their faces, and especially their mouths when eating with strangers. Therefore, observant Muslim women and Berber men are committing felonies in the US by simply walking down the street.

The coming clash between privacy and what I am calling publicy is going to be as large a chasm as that which exists between us and the Berber.

Privacy is largely based on negotiated means to share physical space. Property has boundaries, and people must not trespass without permission. By extension, individuals and companies can conceal what goes on behind the walls of their property, or what is going on in their own heads — subject to the limits of the law.

But a great deal of what goes on in public space is exactly that: public. In the US, for example, it is legal to take pictures of public spaces — and all the people that are there — without asking for the permission of those photographed. And, as I have pointed out earlier, we are not allowed to wear masks or to take other elaborate safeguards to conceal our identity in public, either.

The advent of technologies like Recognizr is inevitable, and there will be no opt-in rigamarole to block the widespread use of such tools. It will soon be a commonplace that people who you don’t know will know who you are. A waitress will say, “Follow me, Mr. Boyd,” without an introduction. Someone next to you on an escalator will ask you how you get ideas for your blog.

We are aware, today, going into a business meeting, that the woman on the other side of the table has most likely looked at your LinkedIn account, read your recent Twitter posts, and looked at the top ten things fetched up by Google based on your name. We are over the fact that old news never dies on the Web, and that a photo of you on a Facebook page may come back to haunt you in an interview setting.

But the true erosion of privacy is not coming about by bad people using stolen information. Cases of identity theft or phishing are illegal, and will remain so.

The end of an era based on privacy ethics and laws is being ushered in by the Web, because the Web is not a shared physical space, leaving various metaphors to the side.

When someone reads my Twitter stream, he does not know if I have my hat on or off. I can be truly anonymous online, in a way that is either impossible or illegal in ‘meatspace’ interactions.

And more importantly, I can belong simultaneously to a non-overlapping set of social circles in which different behavior and social rules are at work. In each of these settings, I may chose to define myself through different sorts of relationships, interactions, and modes of expression. They could range from Suicide Girls to NY Times People, and every shade of expression in between or imaginable.

Privacy is linked to a notion of a unitary self, and the individual’s choices about what to expose to who. Publicy is based on the premise of a socially-defined self, a composite of social contracts through which the individual explores potentially independent selves, each of which is in a sense a construct of the context.

Stated perhaps more plainly, when living publicly online, it is possible for an individual to be involved in many communities, and those communities can have very different notions about sharing and exposing the self.

Businesses are not people, but are made up of communities of people, and interact with other communities in many ways, like media. But increasingly, businesses can interact directly with individuals through online tools, such as blogs, social networks, and other social tools. Sometimes this interaction is relatively impersonal — like a company-hosted online forum — but may be very personal, based on the direct interactions of employees with customers, partners and other non-employees.

We can expect to see a constant tension — if not open conflicts — as our premises of privacy, based on physical shared space and concrete property, come into contact with the new ethos of publicy, in which openness and sharing of collective meaning form the basis of affiliation.

At the same time, businesses are learning to use openness about their business dealings as a way to garner public support in what historically would have been back room business negotiations or secret legal proceedings. Consider the recent case where Time Warner Cable went public over a fee dispute with the News Corporation, and mounted a campaign to build public support for its position in the negotiations.

The largest change is yet to come, however, as businesses move away from an operational ethos predominantly based on shared physical space and a shift to Web-based sociality.  As this increasingly takes root in the operational DNA of business, privacy considerations will erode, and will be superseded by publicy considerations. As with the open Web, individuals will self-aggregate in networks defined by shared meaning and collective purpose. What they share with each other in these contexts are based on the nature of the shared social context, rather than shared physical space.  I do not expect this transition to be either smooth or easy; on the contrary, we should anticipate great upheaval.

Imagine if an engineering group within Toyota had decided to disclose what was known within that group about accelerators to Toyota customers, as soon as they realized there was a problem. In a corporate culture based on industrial era privacy, that would be tantamount to treason. In a corporate culture based on openness and trust, and where the engineers had direct contacts with many Toyota customers in a medium based on openness and sharing of information, they would have disclosed the problem at the outset, and would have saved the company billions in lost revenue and unknown degrees of trust and social capital.

For a good many years, we will see more executive suites trying to hold on to a world based on privacy, secrecy, and perhaps outright deceit, while the great majority of employees are moving personally toward a world based on publicy. Expect controversy and a very difficult midwifing of this brave new world.

Frank Eliason at Comcast is probably one of the most well-known customer service managers in the entire Twittersphere. Today he shares with us some thoughts around his talk at the Dachis Group Social Business Summit 2010.

Before your well known listening efforts with Twitter, was the voice of the customer not as much of a priority or just harder to hear?

During my career I have worked on variety of techniques to gather voice of the Customer data.  Typically this information has been presented as metrics for companies; I have always found there are better, more effective means to use this date to generate change.  Many of us are so concentrated on numbers that we fail to see what is making up this data.  Prior to joining Comcast in September, 2007, I worked for a bank as manager of quality assurance and Customer satisfaction.  While at the bank, we created voice of the Customer through analysis of the words spoken by Customers during calls.  This created a direct connection from the data to the actual Customer story.  Change really happens when people connect to the Customer’s own story.  At Comcast we have done the same thing, using data in social media.  It is the voice of the Customer in their own words, nothing is more powerful.  The best part of this new data source is the information is readily available to all levels within your company.  The CEO can, and ours does, perform the same search that I do each day on places like Twitter, blogs, forums, YouTube, Facebook and so many other spaces.

Twitter is a pretty transparent customer service mechanism. Do you think this will be a trend in other areas of customer service?

There are many ways social media will change the Customer Service industry. Here are a few of the ways Customer Service will change:

1. The biggest change will be internal communication – Today in many call centers, agents rely on knowledge bases and one way tools, but as social media tools take hold internally agent will communicate each other and leaders will learn so much from the agents
2. Listening – Listening to Customers is now so much easier via Twitter, Facebook, Google Blogsearch, etc.  This will show the importance of service to all leaders, and this will earn Customer Service a seat at the table
3. Solutions – Forums and other social spaces have great solutions from Customers, which can be operationalized to assist all Customers, and also use the learning for most areas of the organization.
4. Engagement – When someone needs help, it is natural for service person to want to help, this is just another means to communicate with our Customers.

How has the culture change that you will talk about impacted business results at Comcast?

I have heard for years how marketing is king, but social media is proving the Customer is king.  These conversations are easily shared with all levels, and the Customer is no longer a data point, but instead they are the human aspect of the business.  The same is true for the employee, especially the frontline.  Through the search techniques we do, these conversation can and do reside on the desktop of senior leaders.  They are learning so much about the brand that they really did not have access to in the past.  Social media is not just making the world a smaller place; it is doing the same within the largest of businesses.

Keath Hammonds does a good job explaining Why We Hate HR in his article for Fast Company and his observations can be similarly applied to executive recruiting.  The vexations stem from a wall between HR and the rest of the company. Executive recruiters often get more, if short-lived, c-level and business access but the siloed nature of hiring and organizational design effects them equally.   How can this wall exist? In a knowledge economy the company with the best talent wins so how can it be that the people meant to identify, screen, compensate, hire, introduce, manage and grow talent rarely interact with or understand the business much less the relationships between business units, partners, clients, media and international markets.  And typically lack the necessary education or industry experience for the roles they hire.

If you question my position then ask yourself again why we hate HR and distrust recruiters?  They should be rock stars; I am picturing Intel’s campaign for HR Executives and Recruiters.  They match us with our work.  They coach us, track our careers, portfolios, relationships and compensation.  Is it their fault? If we hire different people into HR and recruitment will the problems go away? A clue to the right answer is how few MBAs or industry executives go into HR.  Another is the phenomenon that HR executives claim victory when they get a seat at the table as if a coup has occurred.

We hate HR and distrust recruiters because they are at the bottom of the business food-chain and/or don’t know what’s up.  And it must be admitted that there are some out there just hoping to make a buck but this is not typical.  Most of them care tremendously but are un-empowered and isolated. Is it fair to blame them?  Of course not.  The responsibility lies with the design of companies which don’t connect talent and corporate strategy.  If HR functioned as a company’s central intelligence and communication core we wouldn’t be having this chat. I must note that this is where executive recruiting is better off than HR in that it has filled the communication gap to some degree and is thus rewarded handsomely but this is not the same thing as fixing the problem.  What we need is a redesign of organizations, business strategy and career management. This is an old problem that is getting stickier by the moment as the business environment becomes more global, technical, transient, social and cross-platform.

So what is Open Colony doing about it?

We value expertise, people in the field actively working to design great work and solve business problems.   We, our advisory board, Salon of experts and consultants  actively work as leaders in their fields.  We also bridge the gap between academia and industry by consulting social scientists, philosophers and professors of the disciplines that effect our work.

We are t-shaped. Many executive search companies suffer from the same regimented, siloed model that the industry does. Small firms are limited by their niche focus, while large firms stumble from a business model that is blind to collaboration among disciplines and industries. Great talent falls through these cracks. We find the right talent by asking “horizontal” questions across disciplines and industries while corroborating our findings with “vertical” experts who specialize in a particular field. This agile, “T-shaped” approach brings you the best talent in the industry. It also informs our organizational design solutions, industry analysis and experience design. Innovation happens at the convergence and we specialize in industry convergence and the next generation of jobs and organizations that they deliver.

We practice what we preach. We implement new technologies, research and tools. We collaborate with start-ups like our current partner vark.com. Our business model and organizational design reflect our values and design principles.

We are biomimics. We designed Open Colony like a mature ecosystem.   By researching and applying ecology studies to work we offer our candidates and clients vibrant, flexible, resilient opportunities and designs. And not only is it innovative, bio-inspired work is good for you.  For how can we fair poorly in a job designed around life’s principals; around products, experiences and economies designed to produce conditions conducive to life?

We are transparent. Recruiting is notoriously secretive but we are social.  We cheered when John Battelle announced Federated Media’s CEO search online (they used a recruiter too).  The Salon is our permeable layer.  Our homepage deconstructs “intro post” as a way to meet members and create dynamic content.  Our members-only Salon shares its discoveries with anyone who is interested and allows them to submit questions via the Open Colony Salon on Vark.

We run on information. By having multiple communications systems, including from the bottom up, dispersed throughout the colony structure and industry a rich feedback loop allows changes in one component of the colony to reverberate through the whole, allowing for adaptation when the environment changes.

My talk was a very simple introduction to why this topic matters, plus a consideration of some recent critiques of transparency initiatives, decorated by a lovely data visualisation of world population growth from the G-Econ project.

It went more or less like this:

We are living with political structures from the last century (or older), and we must be bold in stepping forward to build smarter government services that leverage the power of ‘we’. Even Obama’s administration is still in the relatively early stages of achieving anything like this.

We face problems that governments alone cannot fix – problems that are rooted in network behaviour and whose solutions also lie in network thinking – and we also face issues of fragmentation, identity and belonging in a rapidly, and unevenly globalising world. But also, right here and now, we face the issue of ever increasing expectations of public services, combined with rapidly dwindling funds.

This is the context for the importance of participative processes underpinned by open data. The social web has taught us that lots of people performing simple actions can result in spectacular collaborative outcomes on the aggregate level; and we have also learned the immense power of feedback as an evolutionary force for improvement. These lessons, when applied to using some of the vast array of data produced and consumed by government, could help us create new, perhaps real-time relationships between government and citizens, rather than 4-5 year electoral feedback cycle we see today.

This is partly why we have been working with David Osimo and others on the Open Declaration on European Public Services, calling for greater transparency, participation and empowerment through public service delivery. Please endorse the declaration so that David can present it to the Ministerial Conference in Malmo next month.

We have seen some progress with Data.gov and the UK’s open data project, and extending this to other important data sets, such as mapping data in the UK, is vital work that must continue. We have also seen a number of good participation projects that show the potential for involving people in co-design of services, sense making and decision making. We also have the excellent example of Social Innovation Camp and 4IP that show how people can come together to find innovative solutions to social problems, or just make better public services; and, of course, we have the example of mySociety, who have produced some ground-breaking projects that open up previously invisible data or processes in meaningful ways.

So why are governments not mainstreaming this value more quickly? Why are these projects so under-funded when (at least in the UK) the government is paying millions to large private sector suppliers every month for major projects that deliver little added value and have such a high failure rate? Perhaps the simplest way to change this situation is to top-slice all IT project budgets and distribute 10% of the funding as innovation funds that can allow smaller players, perhaps even community groups, to try to solve the same problem, with follow-on investment if they come up with workable solutions.

In my view, participation and open data projects should be leading the mainstream, not relegated to the periphery.

In thinking about participation and open data projects, I suggested there are four key areas of focus in our social business design methodology that provide useful starting points to think about related success factors:

• ecosystem: developer networks to play with open data, distribution networks and critical friends to help shape these projects in the early stages
• co-design: ensuring that the services we build involve users at every stage of their design, which is in itself an empowering outcome for people used to just ‘getting what they are given’
• signals and data flows: how does information and data move around networks, and how do we signal relevance or importance to others
• filters: more data needs better filters to make sense of it

Finally, I looked at two recent critiques of transparency to consider whether we should watch out for negative externalities or unintended consequences in pursuing open data and participative methods. First, Larry Lessig published a piece Against Transparency that looked at the limits of what he called ‘naked transparency’, and he made the point that raw data (especially about individual performance or potential influence / bias) is open to mis-interpretation and mis-understanding, so total transparency should not be our only goal. He also argues, quite rightly, that there is an attention-span issue that means people will not necessarily track an issue with the diligence we might expect:

To understand something–an essay, an argument, a proof of innocence– requires a certain amount of attention. But on many issues, the average, or even rational, amount of attention given to understand many of these correlations, and their defamatory implications, is almost always less than the amount of time required. The result is a systemic misunderstanding–at least if the story is reported in a context, or in a manner, that does not neutralize such misunderstanding. The listing and correlating of data hardly qualifies as such a context. Understanding how and why some stories will be understood, or not understood, provides the key to grasping what is wrong with the tyranny of transparency.

The other critique that I think we should consider, but which is also very much for the future when we have made far more progress towards opening up government to popular participation, is the issue of legitimacy. Will Davies recently wrote:

…following Mirowski, we might say that ‘government 2.0′ is the final realisation of the neo-liberal state. No auditors, no experts, no objective knowledge, no sense of the common good, just maximum freedom for individuals to form opinions and privately process information. As David Weinberger says in triumphant Hayekian style, “transparency is the new objectivity.” In some instances, consumer perspectives may form the basis of action – demanding change if they’re a prominent journalist or campaigner, selecting a different service supplier if they’re a fortunate lay-person, or just mouthing off on facebook if they’re not so lucky.

But siding with perspective over expertise cannot be the basis for legitimacy. Allowing people to express their frustration or disappointment, but without offering dialogue or improvement at the end of it, removes the security offered by expertise, but without offering anything in its place. Auditors act as the critics of experts, but they do so from some rival position of expertise; they damage legitimacy, but partly so as to then rebuild it. By contrast, a state laid bare only to the audit of general public dissatisfaction is surely heading towards a legitimacy crisis.

What this suggests to me is not so much that the new forms of government we are fumbling our way towards is necessarily less legitimate than a representative democracy run by a bureaucracy, but that we need to find more sophisticated deliberative methods to supplement the simple participation and ‘opinion’ tools that we see today. Not an issue for now, but nonetheless something to think about.

The internet can provide incredible tools for transparency; easy access to large volumes of information, wide distribution to anybody with an internet connection or a library card, and indexing mechanisms to make search easier. In the case of government, it would be trivial to provide access to campaign donations, and then cross reference the voting patterns of any elected government representative. Lessig argues that the massive amount of information needs more context, and with the decline of the newspaper industry (and therefore the decline in investigative journalism), there are fewer outlets to provide it.

In the healthcare sector, it wouldn’t be too difficult to be able to discover information about your doctor to find out which drug companies are paying her airfare to conferences, or a stipend to be a reviewer of potential new drug research (if such information had mandatory reporting requirements).

Where a member of Congress acts in a way inconsistent with his principles or his constituents, but consistent with a significant contribution, that act at least raises a question about the integrity of the decision. But beyond a question, the data says little else.

This is the heart of Lessig’s argument. There is a huge difference between information and insight.

The answer lies not in less transparency but in more effective public metafilters. In a socially calibrated business, effort is made to filter the vast amounts of information available. You must purposefully turn data into actionable information. There is certainly a public corollary.

Public metafilters could be non-profit organizations or “think tanks” meant to distill the mountains of data into meaning. They could be investigative journalists, although the fact that their paychecks come from large corporations could taint their findings. Public metafilters could be bloggers, and others with a passion for the subject matter.

One other big challenge for public metafilters is the scarcity of attention in today’s attention economy. Some issues are incredibly complex, and can’t be boiled down into a sound bite, 140 characters, or even a 500 word blog post. The more complex the issue and the analysis, the smaller the audience for it becomes.

While the decline in the total number of investigative journalists in the newspaper business may cause the ship to tilt to the port side, we have to hope that market forces will create more public metafilters to right the ship, rather than a decrease in transparency.

We welcome your comments on this issue. When is transparency appropriate in your organization?