Ambiguity, legibility, and working in the open (ambiguiti.es)

I've published a new post over at my other blog, the core idea being is that ambiguity is fundamentally a question of legibility. Sometimes we want our work to be easily understood by many people, sometimes we don't. Working openly means making deliberate choices about who can read what and when.

I've reinterpreted my continuum of ambiguity as a spectrum of legibility, drawing on James C. Scott's work on state power, Édouard Glissant's concept of the "right to opacity", and research on open source collaboration. The most important bit is probably this question:

Asking "how legible is this?" always brings a second question: legible to whom, and for whose benefit?

I think this has practical implications for how we think about all kinds of things, including what it actually means to work in the open.

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