Radical Transparency - History and Uses

History and Uses

Modern usage of the term radical transparency coincided with increased public use of Information communications technologies including the internet. Kevin Kelly argued in 1994 that, “in the network era, openness wins, central control is lost.” . David Brin’s writing on The Transparent Society re-imagined the societal consequences of radical transparency remixing Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. However, the explicit political argument for “radical transparency” was first made in a 2001 Foreign Affairs article on information and communication technology driving economic growth in developing regions. In 2006 Wired’s Chris Anderson blogged on the shift from secrecy to transparency blogging culture had made on corporate communications, and highlighted the next step as a shift to ‘radical transparency’ where the “whole product development process laid bare, and opened to customer input”. By 2008 the term was being used to describe the WikiLeaks platform that radically decentralized the power, voices and visibility of governance knowledge that was previously secret .