Transparency

By disclosing non-editable transactional data from the inception of political or business organisations, new organisations become more trustworthy and efficient.

Figure 1. The ring of Gyges - if you were to become invisible, what would you do?

To show you how this works, here's a quick thought experiment... Imagine you were given a ring which makes you invisible much like Frodo in the Lord of the Rings. What would you do? Would you anonymously rob a bank or help a homeless person? It's argued by Plato (where Tolkien got the original idea of LOTR from!) in one of his stories called The Ring of Gyges that the majority of people would rob the bank. Plato's rationale for this was the he believed humans have hierarchical goals, the primary of which are looking after oneself. This has been extensively studied in biology and and psychology and can be depicted graphically as Maslow's Hierarchy.

This kind of sucks as it means everyone is out for themselves and others second. Understanding this you can see why and leads to a limited altruistic society. However, what if we were to turn Plato's thought experiment on its head?

Imagine this time, instead of The One Ring hiding you from everyone, the ring shows everyone everything you do. Would you still get up to similar mischief? Or like what happens with CCTV, if you are watched or even just recorded the majority of people are unlikely to do wrong but actually do good.

This leads to the principle of Radical Transparency and it should be the minimum we expect from someone in political office. If someone is given the privilege of public office, they should be required to disclose all transactions by default. In Australia, this is done, but only to an extent. Data is published by the AEC, for political transparency, but in a poor format, and there is a glaring loophole, dark money can funnel in if the donations are below $9,000. If a mining company, gambling company or optician company want to have their priorities represented all they need to do is make a shell company which donates several $8,999 donations.

To change this is extremely difficult, like the protection of tax havens, there is a bevvy of highly funded lobbyist present when transparency laws are put through parliament. The only other way to do this is to lead by example. Transparency is the primary tenet of The Transparent Corporation.