What is the overlap between transparency and authenticity? This question was posed to me by a friend today.

First I responded within my NVC-hippy framework: “authenticity is what-is-alive-in-me; transparency is a conscious choice I make to share that because that is the kind of world I want to live in.”

This is true, but I am aware with recent urgency that not everyone is going to share my hippie values. And yet transparency is a huge part of the blogoshere culture. So why is transparency valuable to non-hippies?

Today I met Justin at Beer and Blog and he suggested that transparency is a communications strategy that emerges as necessary at a certain point. Duh! It’s not just a feel good thing, it’s a pragmatic thing.

Transparency becomes important at a certain level of complexity. It’s about moving forward quickly and problem solving within complex territory. The more data you have out in the open, the more everybody knows what is going on and can make use of that data quickly. Example: open source = code transparency.

Once you get to a certain point, anything less than transparency just doesn’t make sense. If you want to move forward, everyone needs access to the data.

This takes transparency out of the space of values and authenticity and into the realm of plain old effectiveness. Which I think is the realm that will win, because geeks will rule the next world order and geeks bottom line at pragmatism.

It also takes us out of the messy space of politics. I think politics will eventually be dead as we all learn that it just doesn’t matter and that “what other people think about me is none of my business”. I am defining politics here as “the codification of taking things personally”. I’m talking about things like identity politics and political correctness, not things like voting. When the whole world realizes, at the same time, that what is most effective is to do what you are doing and let other people do what they are doing, then transparency will become a lot easier and more effective. But until then, I’m going to practice it anyway, and hone my ability to take nothing personally.