Ambiguity, legibility, and working in the open

In this post I connect three strands. First, I reintroduce my continuum of ambiguity, which I reimagine as a continuum of legibility. Second, I share some political theory about who gets to see and understand what. Then, third, I consider the practice of working openly — not as radical transparency but as a form of "calibrated legibility."

I've started to think of ambiguity as a question of legibility. Sometimes I want things to be easier to read, understand, and act on for a wide range of people. Sometimes I do not. Working in the open gives me more choices about who can read what, when.

What is legibility?

James C. Scott uses legibility to describe how modern states try to make messy social life easier to see and control. In Seeing Like a State, he documents how governments have deployed standardisation as a tool of power: permanent surnames, detailed maps, censuses, and uniform measures. Standardisation helps states tax, conscript, and plan. But it also produces what Scott calls a "thin" form of knowledge that strips away local detail.

Who benefits from legibility?

Once I understood legibility as something that, like ambiguity, can be increased or decreased, it became obvious that it is not neutral. Michel Foucault famously argued that power and knowledge are inseparable. What counts as legitimate knowledge is tied up with who has the authority to define and classify others.

The poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant talks of a right to opacity. He developed concepts for understanding Caribbean experience as something with its own logic and dignity. Central to his thinking is the claim that difference does not need to be made transparent or comprehensible to be legitimate. Full legibility, in Glissant's framing, can be a form of control or extraction.

Working in the open = calibrated legibility

Working openly is, I've come to realise, a legibility practice. Open Source software projects manage to coordinate without much formal hierarchy: the transparency of discussion, issues, and code makes activity visible and persistent.

This is different from radical transparency as contributors still choose what to put in a commit message, an issue, or a chat channel. There's a healthy tension between working openly and good information security and privacy practices.

Working openly is an ongoing negotiation about legibility. It involves questions such as what do collaborators need to understand, what would be harmful if fully exposed, and what can be shared in a way that remains in productive ambiguity rather than collapsing into dead metaphor.

Some practical advice

From my own evolving practices: name the audience — make explicit what kind of legibility you're aiming for. Use layered artefacts — working notes for generative ambiguity, shared docs for creative/productive ambiguity, public posts for broader legibility. And treat openness as an invitation, not surveillance — transparency works when it supports coordination and learning, not when it is used primarily for control.