Here’s an interesting exchange yesterday between reporters (primarily Chip Reid of CBS) and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs:

The reporters are complaining that in the upcoming White House “town hall” in Annandale, VA, the questions and audience seem too-tightly controlled. They’re frankly up in arms over it, and they do have a point: The Obama administration has bent over backwards to point out how transparent it hopes to be, and so you’d think a “town hall” would be very open.

On the other hand, there are very real considerations that have to be taken into account when one is putting on a public meeting with any hope of it being useful. Without pre-selected questions, you run the risk of just the most “popular” questions being the ones asked. That means we’d get the obligatory why-don’t-we-legalize-marijuana question, along with the prove-you-‘re-actually-a-citizen question. How does that help further a dialogue on health care in America?

Furthermore, this isn’t just a campaign stop — it’s the leader of the free world. A certain amount of decorum and planning is necessary, more than the Obama campaign might have needed when they were mounting whistle-stop town halls across America..

This exchange, to my mind, raises a few issues:

• There are practical limits to “transparency”
• Depending on where you sit, you will likely have a different view of where that line is
• If there is a gatekeeper function, people need to trust the gatekeeper and the process they’re using
• When people are disappointed on the “transparency” issue, they react negatively

So what can an organization (or an administration) do, when caught between a rock and a hard place like this?

I think the important ingredients here are humility and openness.

Note Gibbs’ demeanor in the exchange. He is a little condescending. He gives the impression that it’s all been thought through so just don’t worry about it. He dismisses the question and pokes fun at Reid (“I don’t understand . . . you’re not a member of the public?”).

Instead, Gibbs could have said something like:

We really wanted to make sure a good range of questions were asked, so we felt that we needed to have people looking over the questions before hand. We’re not trying to duck hard questions but instead make sure they’re included. When you just leave things open, often they become just shouting matches and the lowest common denominator rules. We understand that some people might not trust the question-selection process and we’re open to maybe doing it a different way. We’re also happy to talk to you about how we’re choosing the questions in more detail if you would like.

(Surely, Gibbs would say it better than that.) Notice that this is both humble and open. Humble because it recognizes that the administration could be wrong; and open because it stresses the administration’s willingness to engage on what the process looks like.

Note that “opennenss” is not the same as “transparency,” which is the ability of people to see what’s going on in governmemnt. Openness is fundamentally about creating a two-way street between the governmemnt and the governed.