Accountability Work: Examining the Values, Technologies and Work Practices that Facilitate ...
summary
Ethnographic work over seven months at a small UK charity shows how accountability becomes day-to-day labor: purchases funnel through senior staff with a common debit-card buffer practice; monitoring piles into an unseen filing cabinet; accountants try to impose commercial packages but staff rely on an Excel spreadsheet workaround and simply switch accountants. The diagnosis is multiple accountability disorder — conflicting funder, legal and community demands — and the proposed fix is a configurable transparency toolkit that lets staff collect and reframe records and then export funder-friendly reports on demand.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction and context
- 1:06Charities and accountability pressures
- 3:13Ethnographic study at Patchwork
- 4:59Spending and financial accountability
- 6:21Formal vs. informal accountability
- 8:47Lived accountability in community
- 10:53Hidden work and open-door policy
- 12:39Multiple accountability disorder
- 13:42Designing configurable transparency
- 15:50Future of flexible accountability tools
- 16:23Q&A begins
related talks
42mRadical Transparency: Lessons From Open-Sourcing Nearly All Company Documenta...
45mHow to Create a Sustainable Community
45mAvoiding Maslow’s Hammer: Or the Problem of the Birmingham Screwdriver in Open So...
33mReport of the Working Groups
17mBuilding Trustworthy Institutions
34mIt's Dangerous to go Alone: Building Teams like an Organizer
36mCore initiatives and corporate roadmaps — Lessons running an initiative
29mOpen Source Leadership: What to Give Away and What to Bring In