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Raleigh, NC
Ruth Suehle is the community leadership manager for Red Hat's Open Source and Standards team. She's co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O'Reilly, December 2013) and a senior editor at GeekMom, a site for those who find their joy in both geekery and parenting. She's a maker at heart who is often behind a sewing machine creating costumes, rolling fondant for an excessively large cake, or looking for the next great DIY project.
Authored Comments
Operating an open company has two directions: openness within the company, and openness to those outside. I wonder if they always come together, or if many are more open in one direction than the other?
Openness within the company is more dependent on factors like the topic in question. Are there areas in the company that can't be open? Most people would think first with HR, and they do have federal regulations about things that can't be shared. But I worked at one company where performance reviews were a group activity. (In this case, the execution was terrible, but I can see the benefits if it were done with good intentions.) And <a href="http://positivesharing.com/2006/08/why-secret-salaries-are-a-baaaaaad-idea/">this article</a> mentions a company that found so much success in being open with salaries that the resulting accountability is enough to allow employees to <em>set their own salaries.</em>
Then there's the question of external openness. And that's first driven by whether it's a public company or not and what sort of business the companies are in. Overall though, I think that historically, companies have nearly always had more luck in erring on the side of open. But presumably trade secrets still have a place? And then there's Apple, the company that has practically made an art form out of pre-launch secrecy.
You can find the link to Identi.ca at the bottom of the page with the other social networking sites. But we'd be remiss to completely neglect the massive open source discussion happening on Twitter.
http://identi.ca/opensourceway