Slatest passes along a story, "Military Wasn't Told of Fort Hood Shooter's E-Mails," that appeared in today's Wall Street Journal as "Agencies See Gaps in Sharing."
The Slatest post is a great example of saying "OHMYGOD...actually might not be much of a story here," the WSJ article is a little less so. Both make out the story to be "we spent millions after 9/11 to improve information sharing but here's a clear case where information wasn't shared just like in olden days" (with the implication (though the articles admit this is not a sure thing) that things might have turned out differently if information had been shared).
Some sociology of information fundamentals at work here. The WSJ article actually describes what sounds like a pretty thorough process of assessing whether or not to pass along information. For what sound like good reasons, the decision was not to. Now, maybe they need to revisit the structure of their decision process (and this is not necessarily true as no one appears to have shown that the information would have made a difference), but that's different from the story being that agencies are not sharing information.
A senate official is quoted saying "[a]ll signs are indicating that something wasn't put together." But this might be misleading. The article uses a favorite phrase from 2001, "connecting the dots," and speaks of "intelligence gaps." I think both of these are uttered too glibly and unanalytically. These sorts of events bring out massive displays of "hindsight bias" -- the tendency to see things after the fact as a lot more predictable than they really were.
There is probably also a problem with the geometric metaphor of intelligence gaps. We might be able to distinguish topological gaps (information in one place does not reach another place) from topographical gaps (the empty spots in information that any particular knower has access to). When an event like Fort Hood occurs, we start to fantasize about a world in which the gaps pointed to by hindsight would have been bridged over. But to guarantee that we probably need to posit a world in which there are no gaps, but that's a world in which everyone knows everything and without a division of informational labor, the whole thing grinds to a halt.
We need to zero in on how humans share relevant information with those for whom the information is relevant. Competent nodes in an information network have good working models of the relevance systems of the nodes they are connected with. We don't want to eliminate intelligence gaps, we want to make the gaps (read links) more intelligent. And that probably comes most from interaction. And that's something that organizations and agencies are not naturally prone to. What the analysts should look at is what we've spent the millions of dollars on in our quest to fix the intelligence gaps rather than just implying that the effort has been wasted.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Saturday, November 07, 2009
Information Abhors a Vacuum?
Great essay today by Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition. He called it "The Bombastic Fog Engulfs Fort Hood."
Long story short: very quickly after the events at Ft. Hood on Thursday afternoon there were items appearing in the media providing all manner of explanation of things that might or might not have anything to do with those events.
Simon's initial diagnosis is the structure of modern mass communication itself "...in these days where almost anyone can find some kind of audience." A certain kind of event, such as mass killings on the U.S. Army post, "encourages people to analyze and speculate in advance of a lot of actual facts."
He goes on to give a few other examples and then zeroes in on how journalists ran with the idea of pilot fatigue when some airline pilots missed their destination a few weeks back, making the jump from the speculation of experts in the absence of direct knowledge of the circumstances and details of an event to research on the science and politics of pilot fatigue. Any number of stories along this line were produced only to be proven irrelevant (in Simon's on-the-mark characterization) when, upon investigation, it turns out the pilots were playing with their laptop computers.
This reminds me of a few things. One is the propensity of some journalists (and some social scientists, too) to decide very early on "what the story is." That's what your editor wants to know as soon as you pitch an idea -- what's the story, what's the angle? We've all been contacted by a reporter looking for a quote that confirms a particular line they've decided to take in the story or a student who is looking for some research that supports a particular conclusion she wants to draw.
The second thing is that competition for eyeballs and ears forces people who talk and write for a living to talk and write whether or not they have anything to add to our collective knowledge. Dead air is bad.
Those are professional errors, malpractice, if you will, even if of a mundane sort.
There's probably something else going on too -- something more at the "information order" level than the professional practice level. It is fundamentally difficult for a community to learn of an "untethered" fact (unconnected, that is, to a story that grounds it in the web of our taken-for-granted worldview (Weltanschauung)) without someone stepping up to tell a story that does ground it in the known.
And so, the urge that insiders sometimes have to not announce something prematurely "because it will lead to speculation" is probably not nearly the pathology we often make it out to be.
After listening to the essay I began to think about thought experiments in how to balance the incentives. If, as Simon says (that phrase was going to come up in this essay sooner or later), it's because its so easy to "find some kind of an audience" (or at least a soapbox around which there could be an audience), then maybe we (members of the chattering classes -- both amateur and professional) should give some consideration to what we'd say if there were a word tax as well as a word rate. If what you have to say turns out to be irrelevant, not only do you not get your $2 per word, you actually have to pay the rest of us for the bit of our information universe you filled up with worthless drivel.
Long story short: very quickly after the events at Ft. Hood on Thursday afternoon there were items appearing in the media providing all manner of explanation of things that might or might not have anything to do with those events.
Simon's initial diagnosis is the structure of modern mass communication itself "...in these days where almost anyone can find some kind of audience." A certain kind of event, such as mass killings on the U.S. Army post, "encourages people to analyze and speculate in advance of a lot of actual facts."
He goes on to give a few other examples and then zeroes in on how journalists ran with the idea of pilot fatigue when some airline pilots missed their destination a few weeks back, making the jump from the speculation of experts in the absence of direct knowledge of the circumstances and details of an event to research on the science and politics of pilot fatigue. Any number of stories along this line were produced only to be proven irrelevant (in Simon's on-the-mark characterization) when, upon investigation, it turns out the pilots were playing with their laptop computers.
This reminds me of a few things. One is the propensity of some journalists (and some social scientists, too) to decide very early on "what the story is." That's what your editor wants to know as soon as you pitch an idea -- what's the story, what's the angle? We've all been contacted by a reporter looking for a quote that confirms a particular line they've decided to take in the story or a student who is looking for some research that supports a particular conclusion she wants to draw.
The second thing is that competition for eyeballs and ears forces people who talk and write for a living to talk and write whether or not they have anything to add to our collective knowledge. Dead air is bad.
Those are professional errors, malpractice, if you will, even if of a mundane sort.
There's probably something else going on too -- something more at the "information order" level than the professional practice level. It is fundamentally difficult for a community to learn of an "untethered" fact (unconnected, that is, to a story that grounds it in the web of our taken-for-granted worldview (Weltanschauung)) without someone stepping up to tell a story that does ground it in the known.
And so, the urge that insiders sometimes have to not announce something prematurely "because it will lead to speculation" is probably not nearly the pathology we often make it out to be.
After listening to the essay I began to think about thought experiments in how to balance the incentives. If, as Simon says (that phrase was going to come up in this essay sooner or later), it's because its so easy to "find some kind of an audience" (or at least a soapbox around which there could be an audience), then maybe we (members of the chattering classes -- both amateur and professional) should give some consideration to what we'd say if there were a word tax as well as a word rate. If what you have to say turns out to be irrelevant, not only do you not get your $2 per word, you actually have to pay the rest of us for the bit of our information universe you filled up with worthless drivel.
Notification on TV
Once you start thinking about notification, you see it everywhere. Just in the last few days, it's figured centrally in episodes of PBS's "Masterpiece Mystery: Inspector Lewis" and AMC's "Madmen" (see also 9.20.2008 and 9.8.2008).
In episode 12, "The Grownups," Pete chats with Harry with the TV turned down. The audience can see Walter Cronkite talking about a news flash from Dallas but Pete and Harry are too engrossed in their conversation. We cringe knowing what they don't know but are about to find out. Other characters then crowd into Harry's office to watch the news. Don emerges from his boss's office to see the main work area basically empty but all the phones ringing. He's beside himself trying to figure out what's going on. Then he does. Later a few of the characters talk about the fact that they "just had to call" so and and so (this even though news of the assassination was one of the most quickly diffused messages in history up to that point.
And, of course, about half of the dramatic tension of the entire show is generated by all the secrets kept by characters from one another (with the audience tipped off and forced to watch painfully as characters they care about remain in the dark).
SPOILER ALERT. In the "Inspector Lewis" episode titled "The Quality of Mercy," Lewis' Sergeant discovers some information about Lewis' wife's death a few years earlier. He gets the info on a phone call while Lewis is sitting next to him but says "oh, nothing" when Lewis asks him what it was about. When he eventually tells Lewis later that day, Lewis is furious and takes it as a sign that their relationship is really quite flawed. Sergeant Hathaway explains that he withheld the information because of their relationship, but Lewis pretty much says "we don't even have one if you thought it was O.K. to wait to tell me."
In episode 12, "The Grownups," Pete chats with Harry with the TV turned down. The audience can see Walter Cronkite talking about a news flash from Dallas but Pete and Harry are too engrossed in their conversation. We cringe knowing what they don't know but are about to find out. Other characters then crowd into Harry's office to watch the news. Don emerges from his boss's office to see the main work area basically empty but all the phones ringing. He's beside himself trying to figure out what's going on. Then he does. Later a few of the characters talk about the fact that they "just had to call" so and and so (this even though news of the assassination was one of the most quickly diffused messages in history up to that point.
And, of course, about half of the dramatic tension of the entire show is generated by all the secrets kept by characters from one another (with the audience tipped off and forced to watch painfully as characters they care about remain in the dark).
SPOILER ALERT. In the "Inspector Lewis" episode titled "The Quality of Mercy," Lewis' Sergeant discovers some information about Lewis' wife's death a few years earlier. He gets the info on a phone call while Lewis is sitting next to him but says "oh, nothing" when Lewis asks him what it was about. When he eventually tells Lewis later that day, Lewis is furious and takes it as a sign that their relationship is really quite flawed. Sergeant Hathaway explains that he withheld the information because of their relationship, but Lewis pretty much says "we don't even have one if you thought it was O.K. to wait to tell me."
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Information Forms in Everyday Life
News in recent years have featured a wide-array of "information problems" as background story. Setting a few of these side-by-side let's us get a sense of what I mean by "informational forms."
"Stove-piping" happens when "raw information" is inappropriately transmitted directly to higher-ups without being "vetted" which refers to systematic "sifting, disambiguating, analyzing" (Wikipedia).
In news organizations and financial organizations information can threaten conflicts of interest and so "firewalls" or "Chinese walls" are maintained : an information barrier that prevents members in one part of the organization from knowing what's going on in another part (news and advertising in journalism, analysis and investment in banking).
When this effect is generated inadvertently we have "information silos" -- situations in which entities have information that one, the other, or both could benefit from sharing that does not occur because of ignorance, lack of compatible systems, or organizational jealousies.
There are also cases where the problem is neither a deficit of information in a particular organizational location nor disregard for standard procedures but variations on information overload or "too much information" (see post from 20080915). In these situations we have real world phenomena generating so much information that it's nearly impossible to construct an apparatus that is up to the task of figuring out what it means. At one extreme we have issues of transparency and democracy -- is there a point at which more information does not help voters make informed decisions because they simply can't expend the energy necessary to make sense of the information? At the other is information -- and here the financial industry is the example -- that's simply too difficult for those who need to understand it to understand.
Next, I'll work on turning these preliminary examples into a typology of information forms -- identifying the underlying dimensions along which they are arrayed with hope of completing the typology with as yet unexamined forms.
"Stove-piping" happens when "raw information" is inappropriately transmitted directly to higher-ups without being "vetted" which refers to systematic "sifting, disambiguating, analyzing" (Wikipedia).
In news organizations and financial organizations information can threaten conflicts of interest and so "firewalls" or "Chinese walls" are maintained : an information barrier that prevents members in one part of the organization from knowing what's going on in another part (news and advertising in journalism, analysis and investment in banking).
When this effect is generated inadvertently we have "information silos" -- situations in which entities have information that one, the other, or both could benefit from sharing that does not occur because of ignorance, lack of compatible systems, or organizational jealousies.
There are also cases where the problem is neither a deficit of information in a particular organizational location nor disregard for standard procedures but variations on information overload or "too much information" (see post from 20080915). In these situations we have real world phenomena generating so much information that it's nearly impossible to construct an apparatus that is up to the task of figuring out what it means. At one extreme we have issues of transparency and democracy -- is there a point at which more information does not help voters make informed decisions because they simply can't expend the energy necessary to make sense of the information? At the other is information -- and here the financial industry is the example -- that's simply too difficult for those who need to understand it to understand.
Next, I'll work on turning these preliminary examples into a typology of information forms -- identifying the underlying dimensions along which they are arrayed with hope of completing the typology with as yet unexamined forms.
Friday, October 09, 2009
The Social Organization of Collective Blindspots
Floyd Norris has a piece in the NYT under the headline "When Law Obscures The Facts." In it he describes a -- fill in a word that is the opposite of a loophole -- in the 1995 Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. The law was passed at the urging of corporations to limit what they saw as "frivolous" investor lawsuits. One of its provisions, according to Norris, is investor lawsuits that allege fraud must be highly specific and concrete about what the fraud was or be subject to summary dismissal.
This means the suit can be dismissed before the plaintiff gets to do any discovery. And so there's this Catch-22: you can't sue unless you can detail the fraud, but you can't detail the fraud unless you can force the defendant to disclose information.
The irony that drives Norris' article is that in the wake of the 2008 collapse of the auction-rate securities market a lot of corporate investors that had purchased these securities are being excluded from settlements in which Wall Street is reimbursing other investors.
There are various theories about what happened in this market. The guy who invented it, Ron Gallatin, thinks it was a matter of salespersons simply not understanding what they were selling. Others think it was more explicitly fraud that led to investors buying things that they didn't know what they were.
As Norris puts it:
Works Mentioned
This means the suit can be dismissed before the plaintiff gets to do any discovery. And so there's this Catch-22: you can't sue unless you can detail the fraud, but you can't detail the fraud unless you can force the defendant to disclose information.
The irony that drives Norris' article is that in the wake of the 2008 collapse of the auction-rate securities market a lot of corporate investors that had purchased these securities are being excluded from settlements in which Wall Street is reimbursing other investors.
There are various theories about what happened in this market. The guy who invented it, Ron Gallatin, thinks it was a matter of salespersons simply not understanding what they were selling. Others think it was more explicitly fraud that led to investors buying things that they didn't know what they were.
As Norris puts it:
If there ever is a wide-ranging trial, we might get to see which issues of auction-rate securities were owned by Wall Street firms in the summer and fall of 2007, and how much they sold before the collapse. We might learn if the firms understood risks they did not mention to customers.This episode goes into the file for my chapter on "the social organization of ignorance" -- another example of how institutions and structures can systematically reduce the amount of information available in the social world. It's related to "democracy and the information order," as Gillian Hadfield and I have written about (also the subject of several other posts in this blog: here and here), reminds us a bit of Robert Proctor's concept of "agnotology," and resonates at least a little with some points raised by Mark Danner in an NYRB article about torture last spring (where he argued that we need to know the answer to the question "did it work?" in order to have a responsible political discussion)
But that will not happen if judges continue to prevent such cases from proceeding even to the discovery process. Corporations that cheered the 1995 law may discover it keeps them from having a chance to recover their own losses.
Works Mentioned
- Danner, Mark. 2009. "US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites: ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody by the International Committee of the Red Cross" New York Review of Books Volume 56, Number 6 · April 9, 2009
- Hadfield, Gillian and Dan Ryan. 2008. "Democracy and the Information Order"
- Proctor, Robert N. and Londa Schiebinger (eds.). 2008. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance
. Stanford University Press.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Surveilance Raised to the Second Power
The following article appear about a week ago over the AP business wire. It turns out that parents who "spy" on their children may be unwittingly helping corporations to spy on them too. It's very valuable to folks in marketing to know what kids are talking about. If you believe the companies that make/sell the child surveillance software to parents, the information being collected is not associated with the kids' names but it is tagged with information about the kid (ironically, often entered by the parent when s/he sets the software up in the first place).
One easy take-away is the idea that norms about spying on kids are highly dependent on who is doing the spying and why. If you have legal custody of the kid and you are trying to protect her from predators, spy away. If you are a commercial entity who wants to listen in to the kids' chats, you're crossing the line.
Bunch of sociology of information questions emerge in what looks in the article to be real mishmosh of thinking about this phenomenon. We see talk of "targeting children" (by marketers), "putting the children's information at risk" (not really sure what that means), legal issues of collecting data from kids and having parents' permission implied if software is installed, and so on. What doesn't get thematized is that this is yet another example of trading a service for your information. In pure economic terms it can be written off as an exchange, that, if people do it, must be identifying an equivalence in value (as in, "it's worth it to me to play this game at the cost of the provider can observe what kind of music I like"). In fact, though, I suspect that these dimensions of value are more orthogonal than is being pretended. It works because of multiple slights of hand -- one isn't really sure what information one is giving up or what is happening to it or one doesn't get to evaluate those questions until after certain commitments have been made or it's just plain too complicated to find out.
Look for another post soon about FaceBook applications and quizzes and the kinds of information give-aways and grab-ups that they involve.
Web-monitoring software gathers data on kid chats
Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids' online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children's chat messages — and sell the marketing data gathered.
Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids.
"This scares me more than anything I have seen using monitoring technology," said Parry Aftab, a child-safety advocate. "You don't put children's personal information at risk." [Read More...]
One easy take-away is the idea that norms about spying on kids are highly dependent on who is doing the spying and why. If you have legal custody of the kid and you are trying to protect her from predators, spy away. If you are a commercial entity who wants to listen in to the kids' chats, you're crossing the line.
Bunch of sociology of information questions emerge in what looks in the article to be real mishmosh of thinking about this phenomenon. We see talk of "targeting children" (by marketers), "putting the children's information at risk" (not really sure what that means), legal issues of collecting data from kids and having parents' permission implied if software is installed, and so on. What doesn't get thematized is that this is yet another example of trading a service for your information. In pure economic terms it can be written off as an exchange, that, if people do it, must be identifying an equivalence in value (as in, "it's worth it to me to play this game at the cost of the provider can observe what kind of music I like"). In fact, though, I suspect that these dimensions of value are more orthogonal than is being pretended. It works because of multiple slights of hand -- one isn't really sure what information one is giving up or what is happening to it or one doesn't get to evaluate those questions until after certain commitments have been made or it's just plain too complicated to find out.
Look for another post soon about FaceBook applications and quizzes and the kinds of information give-aways and grab-ups that they involve.
Web-monitoring software gathers data on kid chats
* By DEBORAH YAO, AP Business Writer - Fri Sep 4, 2009 5:16PM EDT
Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids' online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children's chat messages — and sell the marketing data gathered.
Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids.
"This scares me more than anything I have seen using monitoring technology," said Parry Aftab, a child-safety advocate. "You don't put children's personal information at risk." [Read More...]
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
The "Is More Information Always Better?" File
Monica Davey's article "Case Shows Limits of Sex Offender Alert Programs" in the NYT (2 Sept 2009)raises a number of interesting sociology of information issues.
The basic story is that sex offender registration policies did not seem to do much good in the case of a California man found out last week to have kidnapped a young girl and held her for 19 years in his back yard. The alleged perpetrator was a registered sex offender, reported regularly to a parole officer, and wore a GPS tracking device, and law enforcement officials had visited and looked around his home.
It is, I think, a bit of a red herring to argue that this case shows a weakness of the registry system as it exists. But the conversation does point to some important issues about the mechanisms by which we expect "public information" to produce "public goods."
So what are the questions here? The most obvious one, expressed in general terms, is how much prevention does tracking actually provide? Another is whether or not the zealous inclusion of every minor sex-related offense (the article cites, as an example, a one-time flasher) over-taxes law enforcement and blinds society to "the real problems." A proponent of registries who was quoted in the article said
The basic story is that sex offender registration policies did not seem to do much good in the case of a California man found out last week to have kidnapped a young girl and held her for 19 years in his back yard. The alleged perpetrator was a registered sex offender, reported regularly to a parole officer, and wore a GPS tracking device, and law enforcement officials had visited and looked around his home.
It is, I think, a bit of a red herring to argue that this case shows a weakness of the registry system as it exists. But the conversation does point to some important issues about the mechanisms by which we expect "public information" to produce "public goods."
So what are the questions here? The most obvious one, expressed in general terms, is how much prevention does tracking actually provide? Another is whether or not the zealous inclusion of every minor sex-related offense (the article cites, as an example, a one-time flasher) over-taxes law enforcement and blinds society to "the real problems." A proponent of registries who was quoted in the article said
“Look, nobody ever suggested that registering sex offenders is going to remove sex offenders from the planet, but let’s at least make sure they’re not working in your elementary school or coaching the soccer team.”I don't think the research is entirely clear as to whether the law accomplishes this or not, but it points to an interesting question. The registries are online and searchable, with the idea that this amounts to information empowerment that keeps state officials accountable -- a kind of open-government move: if the official don't do their job, the public will find out. But, of course, "the public" suffers from the same information overload that police departments do. Knowing that there are 1500 registered sex offenders in your county may not be all that helpful in terms of making decisions about where to live, send your kids to school or how high a fence to build around your pool. Some "experts" say we should make some distinctions and prioritize rather than lumping teenage sex in the same category as a violent rape and kidnapping. But that raises 5he challenging problem of where to draw the line. I'll bet the equilibrium in that game is always over on the side of TMI -- too much information to be really useful. In other words, most collectives would opt for more information than they can "make sense of" even if it means they will "see" less than if they had less information.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Let's Take It Seriously
To my colleagues in higher education: Let's take assessment and accountability seriously AS AN INSTITUTION. There is a tendency to equate assessment with measuring what professors do to/with students. The buzz word is "accountability" and there's this unspoken assumption that the locus of lack of accountability in higher education is the faculty. I think that assumption is wrong.
We should broaden the concept of assessment to the whole institution. Course instructors get feedback on an almost daily basis -- students do or don't show up for class; instructors face 20 to 100 faces projecting boredom or engagement several times per week; students write papers and exams that speak volumes about whether they are learning anything; advisees tell faculty about how good their colleagues are. By contrast, the rest of the institution has little, if any, opportunity for feedback. It's important: one substandard administrative act can affect the entire faculty, so even small things can have a big negative effect on learning outcomes.
In the name of accountability throughout the institution I propose something simple, but concrete: every form or memo should have a "feedback button" on it. Clicking on this button will allow "users" anonymously to offer suggestions or criticism. These should be recorded in a blog format -- that is, they accumulate and are open to view. At the end of each year, the accountable officer would be required in her or his annual report to tally these comments and respond to them, indicating what was learned, what changes have been made or why changes were not made.
The important component of this is that the comments are PUBLIC so that constituents can see what others are saying. Each "user" can see whether her ideas are commonly held or idiosyncratic and the community can know what kind of feedback an office is receiving and judge its responsiveness accordingly.
Why anonymous? This is feedback, not evaluation. This information cannot be used to penalize or injure anyone. The office has opportunity to respond either immediately or in an annual report. Crank comments will be weeded out by sheer numbers and users who will contradict them. In the other direction, it is clear that honest feedback can be compromised by concerns about retribution, formal or informal. Further analysis along these lines would further support the idea that comments should be (at least optionally) anonymous.
We should note that we already do all of this in principle -- many offices around campus have some version of a "suggestion box." What is missing is (1) systematic and consistent implementation so that users get accustomed to the process of providing feedback, and (2) a protocol for using the feedback to enrich the community knowledge pool and to build it into an actual accountability structure.
The last paragraph makes the connection to a sociology of information. Information asymmetries (as when the recipient knows what the aggregate opinion is, but the "public" does not) and the atomization of polities (this is what happens when opinion collection is done in a way that minimizes interactions among the opinion holders -- cf. Walmart not wanting employees to discuss working conditions -- preventing the formation of open, collective knowledge*) are a genuine obstacle to organizational improvement. Many, many private organizations have learned this; it's not entirely surprising that colleges and universities are the last to get on board.
* as opposed, say, to things that might be called "open secrets"
We should broaden the concept of assessment to the whole institution. Course instructors get feedback on an almost daily basis -- students do or don't show up for class; instructors face 20 to 100 faces projecting boredom or engagement several times per week; students write papers and exams that speak volumes about whether they are learning anything; advisees tell faculty about how good their colleagues are. By contrast, the rest of the institution has little, if any, opportunity for feedback. It's important: one substandard administrative act can affect the entire faculty, so even small things can have a big negative effect on learning outcomes.
In the name of accountability throughout the institution I propose something simple, but concrete: every form or memo should have a "feedback button" on it. Clicking on this button will allow "users" anonymously to offer suggestions or criticism. These should be recorded in a blog format -- that is, they accumulate and are open to view. At the end of each year, the accountable officer would be required in her or his annual report to tally these comments and respond to them, indicating what was learned, what changes have been made or why changes were not made.
The important component of this is that the comments are PUBLIC so that constituents can see what others are saying. Each "user" can see whether her ideas are commonly held or idiosyncratic and the community can know what kind of feedback an office is receiving and judge its responsiveness accordingly.
Why anonymous? This is feedback, not evaluation. This information cannot be used to penalize or injure anyone. The office has opportunity to respond either immediately or in an annual report. Crank comments will be weeded out by sheer numbers and users who will contradict them. In the other direction, it is clear that honest feedback can be compromised by concerns about retribution, formal or informal. Further analysis along these lines would further support the idea that comments should be (at least optionally) anonymous.
We should note that we already do all of this in principle -- many offices around campus have some version of a "suggestion box." What is missing is (1) systematic and consistent implementation so that users get accustomed to the process of providing feedback, and (2) a protocol for using the feedback to enrich the community knowledge pool and to build it into an actual accountability structure.
The last paragraph makes the connection to a sociology of information. Information asymmetries (as when the recipient knows what the aggregate opinion is, but the "public" does not) and the atomization of polities (this is what happens when opinion collection is done in a way that minimizes interactions among the opinion holders -- cf. Walmart not wanting employees to discuss working conditions -- preventing the formation of open, collective knowledge*) are a genuine obstacle to organizational improvement. Many, many private organizations have learned this; it's not entirely surprising that colleges and universities are the last to get on board.
* as opposed, say, to things that might be called "open secrets"
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