Questions + Answers = Transparency

Virgance is a for-profit company based in SF that blends the power of social networks with the passion of activism to take some big (grassroots) steps to make the world a better place.   Cool.  From crunchbase.com:

“Virgance is a for-profit, web 2.0 company that takes new activism ideas and uses the power of online social networks to scale each idea into a large-scale, citizen-powered global campaign in order to improve the world. Virgance plans to build social web applications on top of a platform that auto-deploys our apps to Facebook, MySpace and other open social platforms in order to make activism and civic engagement more fun, more effective, more social, and more widely embraced”

What I’m most interested in is their unique commitment to corporate transparency and the subsequent culture created.  According to a recent write-up on TC,

“The company also stresses transparency, holding regular meetings where team members can ask each other questions that they “have to answer”.

I sure would like to listen in that!

I remember reviewing the original Virgance site (known as Carrotmob back when this concept was just launching) and I came across a single and separate web page created by Founder and President Brent Schulkin detailing a level of personal transparency I’ve yet to see elsewhere, anywhere.   From political positions to social issues I can recall a page full of challenging Q & A’s  put right out there for everyone to see; very uncommon in today’s business environments.

I also remember the disclaimer: “This information will be posted on a temporary basis and removed shortly.” Fair Enough, but why I wonder?!?!

It’s in this sense that I see the web tearing down the walls between us to continuously create deeper and deeper levels of transparency by forcing out the harder questions that ultimately lead to intimate answers.   These answers  can support both our individual and collective thoughts, opinions, and beliefs on a wide variety of topics that may serve to define our “whys” (defined as motivations & intentions.)

Ultimately, these questions give us peoples a greater sense of who we’re dealing with and can double-up as a litmus test for accountability; consider it the end-game of transparency-we’ve got a ways to go…

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