Peering Inside: Transparency and opacity
Linden Lab is very proud of its transparency, both as a business and as a workplace. Openness and transparency are enshrined in the Tao of Linden.
Unfortunately much of that transparency only seems to pass internally. Sure, Linden Lab publishes lots of interesting and useful statistics and makes various kinds of data accessible -- but while that's very nice, that's not transparency.
In fact, when it comes to business transparency, Linden Lab tends to put the foot down and push back.
Transparency is Assurance -- Ben McClure
There's the core point of transparency, whether we're talking the transparency of financial statements or the transparency of business operations. Transparency does not just deal with the publication of numbers, facts and figures -- indeed, all of these things can be used to obfuscate, unless they are accompanied by genuine transparency.
Transparency is the ability to conduct business in a clear and accountable way, especially associated with the human part of the business. Transparency is one of those things that Quality Assurance programs try to engender, but so many corporations completely miss the mark, because they do not understand the fundamental goal.
Transparency is Assurance -- That quote encapsulates things so nicely that we're reiterating it for effect.
To be transparent, you must first of all be easily understood, clear, frank and candid. These lay the foundation for the key plank in the platform: Predictability.
A transparent company is not a company that shows and tells you every little thing it does throughout the day, like some corporate exhibitionist; nor is it a company with open books, published statistics and publicly available figures. Neither does predictability mean that you can necessarily prophecize what the company will do when confronted with unpredictable conditions and circumstances.
A transparent company is a company (simplifying outrageously) that tells you how its pieces work, and that works in the way it tells you. You understand its mechanisms, and you have confidence that they function as described. That gives you assurance.
Accepting these basic definitions, it isn't difficult to see that Linden Lab simply does not possess that kind of transparency.
That sort of predictability and assurance is something that Linden Lab traditionally backs away from. 'If you show me a case where some [other business] provides [that level of transparency], I can try to argue for it. Otherwise there isn't much hope,' said one Linden at office hours. Variations of that statement aren't exceedingly rare in Linden office hours, in our experience demonstrating that Linden staffers themselves feel that business transparency is an uphill battle internally. The queries themselves are rarely about numbers, finances or figures.
They're about policy -- the policies that Linden Lab uses to deal with operations, and particularly with customers. You and me and others. All of us.
So far, Linden Lab largely represents as a dark sack, whose interior must be guessed at, and whose motions and bulges seem largely capricious -- not because they necessarily are, but because we do not know the reasons for them. A puzzle game, with no obvious rules, and Linden Lab remains a puzzle.
We don't really want to know what a department is doing all day, or how much cash Linden Lab has in the bank, or how much they spend on a network operations engineer, or what they did in a particular case of abuse-report handling. Well, perhaps we actually do sometimes -- but that's because we're trying to deduce what the rules are to this puzzle from the tiny indicative scraps available.
That's not assurance, and it sure as heck isn't transparency.
