Great distinction. I totally agree.

You're right that there are internal documents that the business is required to develop. Or ones that are necessary for the business to function. Those may or may not be proprietary.

I was thinking more along the lines of the ethereal thought process of the entrepreneur or maybe providing context for public decisions.

Thanks for making this distinction.

Exactly. There's a distinction between information you want public and info that should be kept internal.

> you do not put all your learnings in the public view..

why not?

I am not a business person. So none of this may be valid. But I can think of a few possibilities:

* Some of the lessons learned are highly specific to your project/team. They may not translate well to other teams/projects. Such things, while valuable, may not make sense on a blog.

* Perfect transparency may be at odds with building brand confidence. Letting your customers see every one of your mistakes (in the guise of lessons learned) may work either way with regards to customer confidence.

It also depends on your model. Our business hinges on our domain knowledge and expertise. We share some but not all. We want to give to the community, but still maintain a competitive advantage.

Agreed. I wasn't arguing for absolute transparency. However it's almost always possible to phrase your learnings in such a way that they don't reveal your secret sauce or proprietary secrets.

Agreed that it might not make sense on a blog; I was just reacting to the general trasparency question. In terms of building brand confidence, my experience is that being honest about mistakes and what you're doing to cut down the chance they'll happen in the future is great from a customer relations point if you do it well.