I'll take the (currently unpopular) position that a context that has no affordances for backroom dealings cannot add value at all. If true, sustainable value is being created, there is some secrecy going on somewhere, whether or not it has been institutionalized.

The best version of the full transparency model I've heard is Clay Shirky's:

Clay Shirky frames this in a succinct way in his TED talk, "Institutions vs. Collaboration" http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_sh...

His version: the moment you institutionalize a value-producing collaboration/coordination process, the first goal of the institution becomes self-preservation rather than the value-producing process.

He has a rather complicated argument having to do with "institutions" being about professionalizing the top 20% of value producers who produce 80% of the value. So Clay's argument is roughly:

1. Every value-producing process is a power law
2. Institutions professionalize the 20% who produce 80% of the value, and exclude the remaining 80% who produce 20% of the value
3. Un-institutionalized open coordination/cooperation processes (eg. social bookmarking, social tagging of photos on Flickr -- his example -- or #iranelection) retain 100% of the value by staying in (or reverting to) a state of "mass amateurization" within which people can contribute as little or as much as they want.
4. Clay's argument ends with point 3, but let me extrapolate. Once an un-instution has been institutionalized, a "professional" language emerges that strengthens the boundary
5. In the short term, the professionalized "inside" vastly improves the value-producing process through elimination of the distraction from the less-skilled/less passionate "amateurs" and it gets a lot more productive
6. BUT in the long term, the closed nature of the system makes it ritualized and it loses its vitality; it becomes a toxic silo that holds on to its "professional" monopoly for a while till it is displaced by a substitute value-producing process

If you look carefully at this argument, there is no need for formal "institutionalization" for this process to occur. The break-point for secrecy to enter is simply the point at which money can be made by a few. In non-business contexts, the currency may be sex or power instead of money.

Even for a power law left to evolve in the "wild" as it were, the top 20% producers WILL find each other and start dealing with each other in more exclusive ways, help improve each other's skills and through a runaway effect of mutual support, widen the chasm between themselves and the rest. At some point, they WILL have an incentive to make money off their exceptional expertise. At this point, there WILL be an incentive for secrecy and backroom dealings, to preserve competitive advantage.

The point is, the seeds of this secrecy are in the very open power law process that Clay holds up as the ideal. Even something as inchoate as #iranelection, I am willing to bet, either had a core group of Iranians and non-Iranians who have "backroom" dealings, or one emerged very rapidly after. If not, the process cannot have added any lasting value.

To take Clay's example in the talk, photo sharing on Flickr, sure one breed of professionals involved in photography may have been deprofessionalized (the photographers themselves), but I am willing to bet that a DIFFERENT group of professionals (perhaps those who play the coordination/search game well) has emerged.

Secrecy is an information-theoretic necessity in the Darwinian ecosystem of knowledge creation. If everything is completely open all the time, the system will be like a thermodynamic system with no gradients, that very quickly returns to a max entropy state, incapable of doing useful work, with even the slightest disturbance. The Hoover dam was built for a reason. The Colorado river could not really be put to work without it the way it has.