How to deal with a 2nd OpenPGP Summit?

[nico at enigmail.net]

Hi all,

in April 2015 we had a first OpenPGP summit.
It was a meeting where the technical experts of projects and tools
dealing with OpenPGP with a focus on email encryption
met to getting to know each other personally and
discuss several issues.
For details, see e.g.
- https://www.gnupg.org/blog/20150426-openpgp-summit.html
- https://www.mailpile.is/blog/2015-04-20_OpenPGP_Email_Summit.html

The meting initially was organized by me to bring together
a few guys/projects working in that area, but it became
pretty big (about 30 people). This caused some problems,
because we had a host with limited space (so I finally
even had to reject some people wanting to attend).

We also discussed there how to continue.
On one hand we wanted to have the meeting open so that
anybody wanting to attend could do that and to give trust
by transparency.
On the other hand we want to be able to continue to focus
on technical issues (having a well signal to noise ratio)
in a not-too-large group of "experts".
We didn't find an appropriate way yet to deal with both
interests.

Now, I am about to organize a second meeting at the end of this year.
And I want to take the "wisdom" of this crowd to discuss this issue.

What I currently have in mind is a meeting open to the public
but with some limitations (one reason is to focus the work, another
is simply limited space although I don't know where we can meet
this time).
For example:
- Some priority for those who did attend the first meeting
- Some priority for "other experts", which didn't join
  the first meeting
  (but how do we handle that?)
- Some limitations that a person plays a "significant role"
  in the community
- Some limitation so that a tool/project should normally
  send only 1 or 2 guys

The obvious other option is to open the meeting to
everybody willing to come, which raises a couple of risks
(simply too many people, too many non-experts or people
 who want to change the focus, ...).

So, my questions are:
=====================

Is it OK for the public/community, if we meet in a way
that is limited as describe above (just for practical reasons)?

Is it OK even if we can't promise full transparency (e.g. by video
taping sessions)?

Would it even be OK, if we meet and constraint what is spoken there
to the Chatham House Rule (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule).
Some people requested that because
if anything they say might become public, they might or even
have to be careful what they say.

Any general thoughts or proposals about how to deal with this?

Note that I don't want to have it too complicated.
I organize this meeting in my free time to bring the issues
of this community forward.
And just having too many people is already a problem.
I need an approach I can handle.
Or is it better to have no meeting at all instead of a meeting
with some limitations?

Best
 Nico

-- 
Nicolai M. Josuttis
www.josuttis.de
mailto:nico at enigmail.net
PGP fingerprint: CFEA 3B9F 9D8E B52D BD3F 7AF6 1C16 A70A F92D 28F5