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The second workshop took up the theme of transparency, recognizing both the ubiquitous and slippery usage of the term today. Marstine argued that the tensions between exposure and withholding warrant new approaches to museum transparency as an integral component of twenty-first-century museum ethics. She called for a transparency that makes the disclosure of data meaningful for constituents through contextualization, translation, and mediation, by identifying the agendas and perspectives of those “experts” responsible for framing the data. She asserted that, through equitable knowledge sharing, museum transparency has the capacity to critique and redistribute power and resources (Marstine 2012).

Three strong examples of museum transparency in action served as our case studies. Esmé Ward, Head of Learning and Engagement at Manchester Museum, took participants on a tour of the museum (the venue for the workshop) to demonstrate the efforts directed at making the institution’s values and agendas transparent to audiences. Ward showed how interpretation, permanent collection displays, and social media are used to examine issues of power and ethics around collecting and to encourage reciprocal exchange between the museum and its publics. Audiences are encouraged to be researchers and to draw on what they have learned in the museum to take action in the wider world. Then Michael Pickering explored how the context of repatriation and restoration of cultural rights to Indigenous peoples in Australia had created, by necessity, an environment of transparency at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. He explained that, although enacting transparency was a non-negotiable response to Indigenous activism and related government policy, it had now become part of the museum’s culture because it was “the right thing to do.” In our third case study, Jan Ramirez, Chief Curator and Director of Collections at the National September 11 Memorial Museum, New York, presented both the challenges and imperatives of embedding transparency into the processes and policies of the organization at a time when diverse stakeholders (including families, survivors, first responders, and neighborhood groups) are emotionally invested in the site and when political and media scrutiny are high.

Against the backdrop of these examples, Marstine presented for debate two distinct, but overlapping, models of transparency: “dashboard” (or transactional) and radical. Network participants agreed that dashboard transparency, defined as transparency demonstrated through statistics that benchmark performance outcomes, prioritizes the needs of the institution over obligations to communities. Many critiqued dashboard transparency as too carefully managed; providing an array of data without explaining why the data is important. By contrast, contributors viewed radical transparency, described as equitable knowledge sharing that empowers consumers of information to make critically informed choices and to take action, as a more effective tool for advancing participatory practice, but also more costly in terms of human resources.

Despite the examples highlighted in the case studies, participants concurred that workshop discussions on transparency raised more questions than they answered. Many believed that museums were rarely transparent about their processes and practices, but that radical transparency as a basis for ethical practice had transformative potential. However, Jette Sandahl, Director of the City Museum of Copenhagen, warned against allowing transparency to subjugate more politically difficult issues in the new museum ethics discourse, warning: “The concept of transparency has the capacity to usurp other issues such as power, equal access, reciprocity and democracy which might be more robust and relevant.” Other contributors underscored the link between transparency and trust, while Pickering singled out empathy as a particularly “under-rated” professional stance in museums.

Some network participants were unsure whether audiences were really interested in transparency in museum processes and values; for instance, Merriman suggested that transparency is often a way for museums to justify their own structures and processes, while Ramirez emphasized that transparency may be particularly significant to communities at highly contested flashpoints. It was agreed that there is no endpoint of complete transparency; transparency is a continual negotiation. Marstine referred to the image of glass as a relevant metaphor, that is to say, something which is both clear and opaque at the same time (Marstine 2012). Returning to the practice of transparency at the NMA, Pickering noted that some objects need to be kept hidden from public view because of the sacred or secret beliefs attached to them; however, the museum explains to visitors why they cannot be shared. And while Marstine held that transparency was an instrumental, rather than an intrinsic value, other network members disagreed, asserting that transparency could be an end unto itself.