Transparency (behavior)

Transparency, as used in the humanities, implies openness, communication, and accountability. It is a metaphorical extension of the meaning a "transparent" object is one that can be seen through. Transparent procedures include open meetings, financial disclosure statements, the freedom of information legislation, budgetary review, audits, etc.

Uses

Corporate

Corporate transparency, a form of radical transparency is the construct of removing all barriers to —and facilitating of— free and easy public access to corporate, political and personal information and the laws, rules, social connivance and processes that facilitate and protect those individuals and corporations who freely join, develop and embellish the process.

Management

Radical transparency is a management method where nearly all decision making is carried out publicly. All draft documents, all arguments for and against a proposal, the decisions about the decision making process itself, and all final decisions, are made publicly and remain publicly archived.

Media

Media Transparency is the concept of determining how and why information is conveyed through various means. If the media and the public knows everything that happens in all authorities and county administrations there will be a lot of questions, protests and suggestions coming from media and the public. People who are interested in a certain issue will try to influence the decisions. Transparency creates an everyday participation in the political processes by media and the public. One tool used to increase everyday participation in political processes is Freedom of Information legislation and requests. Modern democracy builds on such participation of the people and media. There are, for anybody who is interested, many ways to influence the decisions at all levels in society.

Politics

In politics transparency is introduced as a means of holding public officials accountable and fighting corruption. When government meetings are open to the press and the public, when budgets and financial statements may be reviewed by anyone, when laws, rules and decisions are open to discussion, they are seen as transparent and there is less opportunity for the authorities to abuse the system in their own interest.

In government, politics, ethics, business, management, law, economics, sociology, etc., transparency is the opposite of privacy; an activity is transparent if all information about it is open and freely available. Thus when courts of law admit the public, when fluctuating prices in financial markets are published in newspapers, those processes are transparent.

Open government is the political doctrine which holds that the business of government and state administration should be opened at all levels to effective public scrutiny and oversight.

When military authorities classify their plans as secret, transparency is absent. This can be seen as either positive or negative; positive, because it can increase national security, negative, because it can lead to secrecy, corruption and even a military dictatorship.

Research

Scholarly research in any scientific discipline may also be labeled as (partly) transparent if some or all relevant aspects of the research are open in the sense of Open source, Open Access and Open Data, thereby facilitating social recognition and accountability of the scholars who did the research and replication by others interested in the matters addressed by it.

Reading

While a liberal democracy can be a plutocracy, where decisions are taken behind locked doors and the people have very small possibilities to influence the politics between the elections, a participative democracy is more closely connected to the will of the people.

Participative democracy, built on transparency and everyday participation, has been used officially in northern Europe for decades. (In the northern European country Sweden, public access to government documents became a law as early as 1766.) It has officially been adopted as an ideal to strive for by the rest of EU.

Many countries in the world still have older forms of democracy, or other forms of government.

Some organizations and networks, for example, the GNU/Linux community and Indymedia, insist that not only the ordinary information of interest to the community is made freely available, but that all (or nearly all) meta-levels of organizing and decision-making are themselves also published. This is known as radical transparency.

• To promote transparency in politics, Hans Peter Martin, Paul van Buitenen (Europa Transparant) and Ashley Mote decided to cooperate under the name Platform for Transparency (PfT) in 2005.

• A similar organization that promotes transparency is Transparency International.

See also

• Accountability
• Accountability in the European Union
• Comitology
• Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (or EITI)
• Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006
• Freedom of information
• Front organization
• Glasnost
• Lobbying
• Market transparency
• Media transparency
• Open society
• Political corruption
• Regulation Fair Disclosure (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Regulation)
• Right to Information Act
• Singapore issues
• SourceWatch
• The Transparent Society (David Brin)
• Transparency (Guatemala)
• Transparency and Accountability (TRAC)
• Whitewash
• Public record

External links

• Transparency International
• The National Institute on Money in State Politics