One of the major issues in the management of any democratic organization is transparency. Though the word itself takes on primarily positive connotations and is oftentimes presumed as absolutely necessary in any democratic organization. However, experience in political offices and organizational leadership positions tells us that the degree of transparency employed by the leadership or executive body is a difficult political as well as ethical question.
In a democratic organization or state, transparency is prima facie necessary. If political or organizational power is to be derived from the constituent members, then its members must be informed. However, there are two glaring problems.
THE NOBLE LIE
The first is the essentially the Platonic kallipolis-style noble (or "virtuous") lie. The masses do not always know what is best for themselves, and it is sometimes necessary to control their access to certain information in order to produce the most desirable consequences. In the Republic, the noble lie is the story where people are born constituted by three different metals, a "lie" used to maintain social harmony by giving legitimacy to the proposed social stratification. Though used in the kallipolis to relate a false myth, the noble lie can be thought to operate through omission as well. Thus, transparency is often undermined by the control of information access for good social consequences.
This is undoubtedly the more dubious of the opposing forces to transparency. From a Kantian perspective, withholding information in such a way is to treat the masses not as ends in themselves, but as means to a socially desirable ends. However, it is important to note that it is a non-ideal policy, operating under the (non-ideal) premise that people are not able to know what is best for themselves. Perhaps a more robust educational system founded on a rigorous study of the liberal arts from the very beginning would be enough to push society towards a more ideal state, but for now, the non-ideal situation must be assumed, and legitimacy given to the noble lie.
INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
The other caveat working against transparency is the management of large volumes of information. Given our new technological age, the access to information is becoming less and less of an issue. With the advent of the internet and constant streams of information coming from every individual (and organizations such as Wikileaks), the problem is less how we access information and more how we sift through all of it to discover what we want to know. We have more than enough information now; in fact, we have too much, and most of the things we publish and share are lost in the annals of cyberspace. An extra email from an executive body (be it the leadership of an organization or political power) becomes hidden amidst thousands of other messages. Even if a responsible, executive power is 100% transparent in their communications, it is not necessarily true that the correct information will reach the correct hands.
So we are left with a difficult problem about transparency. On the one hand, it is the ideal under which democracy is even possible. On the other hand, there are many instances where full disclosure is perhaps not the most wise, and--even if it were--the dissemination of the information is not always a simple task.
PUSH vs. PULL
One possible solution to the issue of transparency is to distinguish between various ways of distributing information. In this way, it will be possible to reject the binary of disseminating and withholding information by being aware of several intermediaries.
One fundamental distinction to make is the difference between push and pull information, terms traditionally used by software engineers to describe data flow. In communications technology, the data-push model consists of an individual pushing the data stream continuously to the clients whereas the data-pull model consists of an individual pushing the data stream to a server where it is held until the client decides to pull the data off the server.
This distinction can be applied to an organizational executive body's control of information access. There are many ways that an organization can choose to convey various information, a variety made much wider by social networking technology, and each of these ways represents a different information conveyance model. A letter, an email, or an announcement at a mandatory meeting would all be a examples of push information. A tweet or a posting to a bulletin board would be examples of push information.
BEYOND THE PUSH/PULL BINARY
It is important to realize that the push/pull information distinction is not a perfect binary. Given the present culture, a client is relatively free to ignore an email. Thus, email is not perfectly an example of push information, and contains elements of pull information as well -- the client would need to actively decide to open the email for the information conveyed to have proper uptake. The specific situation is also important to where the mode of communication falls on the spectrum between push and pull. For example, a direct email from Barack Obama is likely to be opened automatically, whereas an email from the Vice President of the Society for Socially Responsible Electrical Engineers of Manhattan would most likely merit some consideration before opening and reading.
Thus, the urgency of a particular piece of information is given by the relationship between the sender and the recipient, other particularities of the situation, and the mode of communication chosen. We take urgency to be a technical term, which can be defined as the objective degree to which a piece of information can be construed as push information (as opposed to pull). The the term is taken to be an objective quantity, its measurement is extremely difficult and impossible to fully precisify.
MOVING FORWARD
To conclude, the reason why the issue of transparency is so difficult to resolve is because the question is formulated based on an oversimplified binary. The question should not be about whether transparency is good or just. Rather, it should be about the level of urgency given a piece of particular information and whether that is good or just. Discussions about transparency should investigate the relationship between sender and recipient, and then decide on the appropriate means of communication by appeal to the proper level of urgency that should be attributed
