It’s been months since Pennsylvania’s fledgling medical marijuana industry got off the ground in earnest, with state officials in June awarding the first 12 permits for grower-processors, and what we don’t know still far outweighs what we do.

What we do know: which companies received permits to grow, process and dispense medical marijuana; the names of many of the people invested in those companies; and the final scores that determined which companies received the grower-processor permits.

What we don’t know: What the scoring actually means or how points were awarded; what’s in many or most of the applications filed by prospective grower-processors; and who, exactly, scored the applications and awarded the permits in the first place.

On one hand perhaps we shouldn’t feel bad. In June John Collins, the director of the state Office of Medical Marijuana, said that not even the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf knows who sits on the so-called “panel of experts.”

We’ve written before that this represents an illogical extreme. Pennsylvania wants to keep the panel safe from improper lobbying efforts and industry pressure. That’s a noble sentiment. But it doesn’t justify keeping the process secret and shielding the people charged with exercising regulatory and contractual power from public scrutiny.

Last Thursday the state’s Office of Open Records agreed, ruling that the Pennsylvania Department of Health must unmask the members of the panel within the next 30 days.

The ruling, which came in response to a Right-to-Know request and subsequent appeal by the Harrisburg-area newspaper PennLive, is likely to be appealed by DOH officials to Commonwealth Court. Nevertheless, OOR’s conclusion represents an important reaffirmation of the idea that secrecy and good government are often mutually exclusive.

It’s also evidence that the office is pulling no punches on DOH’s flimsy arguments on why the panel should be kept secret. Officials tried to claim that naming panel members’ would expose them to safety risks — but their only evidence of that was an affidavit from Collins that the OOR rightly deemed purely “speculative.”

Here’s something that’s not just speculation: government functions best when it’s open and honest with taxpayers about what’s being done, why, and by whom. Throw a potential gold rush worth hundreds of millions of dollars into the mix — which is what the medical marijuana industry represents — and transparency is even more vital.

In our opinion it’s likely that the courts, not the OOR, will have the final say in this matter. But the office still deserves credit for issuing a determination that serves the best interests of Pennsylvanians.

Unmasking these panelists also serves the best interests of DOH, the state’s Office of Medical Marijuana, and the industry itself — even if they don’t know it yet.