Blogging: Confidentiality vs Accountability

What are the parameters of blogging and how does posting here relate to the various professional obligations that I have?

My first thought, in my first post, was to protect the identities of any of my clients about whom I might write and thus to attempt to conceal my own since my work is tied to place and from place to people. That feels like a no-brainer.

But yet I felt an unease that I struggled to put into words. What about the scholarly record? There are good reasons that scholarly work needs to be both public and attributed (e.g., dialog is essential to develop further knowledge, tracking the source of ideas is key in building new understandings). If someone wanted to quote my work here, either the content or the process of doing a blog, then to whom do they attribute it? P(l)odder? that feels dishonest.

While I support anonymous works in the case of the powerless for whom there are serious risks if revealed (e.g., persons under despotism) it is not something I rest with easily in other cases (e.g., students or faculty needing to express distress about a supervisor). There are negative consequences of anonymity for the individual (a secret is hard to live with, it conveys that the person lacked courage to face the issue) and for the organization (secret accusations undermine trust).

One principle that helps me decide in other situations is to think about who the information "belongs to." In a therapist or lawyer -client relationship, the information about events belongs to the client who also owns how to respond to it. The therapist, for example, doesn't have a right to reveal information other than that which would physically endanger the patient or someone in the patient's environment.

This principle reminds me when I write to be respectful of information (life events) that may be felt to belong to others.

But I still have the tension between holding information confidential and being true to academia and principles shown to work for the best in the long term.

There are political situations that would be most helpful to write out and analyze...and they may be too complex to effectively obscure in a public post. (Perhaps that is why so much of organizational development literature is bland principles and not enough examples.)

So here's the role conflict: academic truth-teller vs developer (respecter of the people with whom I work).

And of course it may be moot-- on the Internet there is no real privacy, no privacy that can be kept for long. Perhaps this is an artificial problem because there is no way to achieve confidentiality in this environment without simply not speaking. But it helps me to lay out my role conflicts first so I choose what I will do (or at least have the illusion of choosing).

If I am to guide faculty or others into this blog environment, then I must be in a position to properly advise on problems such as this. For me that means I have to work them out for myself and then think it through for other disciplines.

So here's a try at some principles:
If there is no true anonymity, then a professional must default to a) obscuring individual identities and b) not sharing larger institutional political situations because any cover story is "thin" and easy to break.

One must simultaneously recognize that this is an academic forum and the expectation of truth telling is basic--one should say that any case discussed is altered from the original and the statement needs to appear with each case.

Or one could speak in terms of hypothetical situations. And speaking hypothetically should be an honest reframing that considers other situations, not a ploy to "cover oneself". (Simply covering oneself, while smart as a single act, is not respectful of the clients).

I'm still inclined to keep the authorship of this general site obscured from the general public since it isn't important for a casual visitor and adds another level of protection. But I'm contemplating ways to reveal my identity to those who need to know it for academic purposes--for citation, literature review, etc.