The Power of Transparency

I’ve been meaning to post on this for a while now. In December, Chris Anderson, (editor in chief at WIRED magazine and author of The Long Tail, which I first mentioned here back in ’05) posted on what transparency in mass media might look like. One of the pithiest summaries of its application to the Web is

THEN: We control the site. Editors are gatekeepers.

NOW: We share control with readers. Editors catalyze and curate conversations that happen as much “out there” as on our own site.

Now, over at Collision Detection, Clive Thompson is throwing out a call to participate in an article he’s writing for WIRED. It’s about, and uses the form of, open, transparent journalism.

Add this to the forthcoming MIT/Wharton collaborative book, We Are Smarter Than Me
and you have, if not a movement, at least a very exciting set of experiments.