The idea of a completely open company is interesting. Balanced is not completely open (yet?) because there are still financial info and salary info that is not public. Gittip is an example of a fully open organization http://gittip.com/ where every single aspect is open. Personally I work at Mozilla which is not fully open but we strive to be as open as possible. For example, salary info is only public for board members, not all employees. Also, Mozilla needs to keep severe security bugs private until all patches are out in order to minimize wild exploits. It is definitely a challenge to be a fully open company.
Happy to hear this about Mozilla and I hope other companies follow the same culture. Balanced cannot possibly be completely open in the sense you refer to since it is a financial services company. For example, the fraud filtering algorithms/rules cannot be open to public (for obvious reasons). So, there are limits. To this end, "open" must not be treated as binary. Balanced is much more "open" than most other companies since it opens up (among possibly others): 1. It's dashboard (which is core product) 2. Specs (again, core product) and openly discusses product features - including limitations in public.
actually, arguing that fraud filters must be private is interesting. Would you make the same argument about keeping encryption algorithms private? :) The two concepts are similar but not exactly the same. Unlike encryption algorithms, a fraud filter is not bullet proof. It is just an alert mechanism. So, yeah, it probably needs to be kept secret.
Encryption algorithms are fraud filters are very very different (as you already mentioned). Most functions used are one way and the inverse is (to the best of our current knowledge) intractable (or to be more technical - their complexity class is unknown and widely thought to be intractable). So, it can be made public. Requesting fraud filters to be made public is like asking Google to make their spam detection public. This can (and probably will) defeat the purpose.
