So much for openness. Here are some reasons why the Open Directory is anything but open.

Open Directory Category Editors are volunteers -- indeed, an army or self-governing republic of net-citizens -- but their numbers are, nonetheless, finite. It's not open to all comers. A recent scathing commentary by one disgruntled ex-editor described the army of editors as "as a horrible mix of corrupt generals and untrained privates," since "there are only two kinds of 'guide' volunteer: The passionate, often self-interested, 'subject spammer' and the virtuously motivated, but web-ignorant, 'want-to-belonger'."

That just about says it all, but let's examine some more considerations on this issue of openness at a volunteer-edited directory:

• Lack of representativeness and lack of transparency. Unlike the federal bureaucracy in a democratic nation, you don't precisely know what the criteria for acceptance are. Criteria for progress through the ranks is similarly unknown. The Open Directory's procedures for accepting new editors or accepting site submissions are no more open or transparent than they are at private companies like Yahoo or Looksmart.

• Incentive for corruption and excessive categorization of low-quality sites. Yahoo and Looksmart (presumably "closed shops") have employees performing similar functions to the Open Directory Category Editors. Think about this. Looking at it from the point of view of organizational sociology (yes, I must), the underlying reality is that these three are all organizations with rules and structures whose main output is the opinionated categorization, and importantly, rejection, of a vast number of submissions of web sites and Internet content. The key difference seems to be that dmoz category editors aren't paid. What is the likely result of this? Think about the analogy of a country whose bureaucrats are poorly compensated. Any textbook can give you examples. All moralizing aside, extremely low pay creates an incentive for the postal inspector or the traffic cop to engage in petty forms of corruption. What's my city health inspector's incentive to REALLY crack down on all the bug-infested restaurants downtown? And what might motivate a dmoz category editor to prevent their buddies' lower quality sites from getting one or even several listings? And are they likely to think about the whole mess all fits together, or is that someone else's problem? In fact, there are considerable incentives in volunteer directories to pump up one's numbers of site submissions, since that is the key criterion for advancement through the ranks. The web's best resources, therefore, are impossible to find, buried under a mountain of minutiae.