Working in local government, I can't think of a buzzword that currently holds more weight with the public than "transparency."  And the funny thing is that despite its seemingly semi-recent rise to importance, it's really nothing new.  In 1913, Louis Brandeis, who would later become a Supreme Court Justice, famously said "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants..." referring to bankers at the turn of the century when financial reform was demanded after the excesses of the Industrial Revolution. He believed that by educating customers and investors through transparency, the public could best regulate bankers through the open market (i.e. poorly performing or corrupt bankers would no longer have customers and would go out of business on their own) and the government wouldn't need to regulate the types of deals that bankers made, nor the potential size of their profits.