In the physical sciences, specifically in optics, a transparent physical object is one that can be seen through. The sense of the word used here began as a metaphorical extension of that meaning.
In sociology, politics, ethics, law, economics, business, management, etc., transparency is the opposite of privacy; an activity is transparent if all information about it is freely available. Thus when courts of law admit the public, when fluctuating prices in financial markets are published in newspapers, those processes are transparent; 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 and even a military dictatorship.
Some organisations and networks, for example, Wikipedia, 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 organising and decision-making are themselves also published. This is known as radical transparency.
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