How to deal with a 2nd OpenPGP Summit?

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

I've attended all manner of conferences/meetings from big to small,
invite-only to open doors, expensive to free, heavily organized to improvised.
 I think far and away the most productive conferences for groups of 20+ people
are Unconference/Barcamp/"Gunner-style" conferences, which are totally open,
have no fixed agenda, and have 1-4 moderators to run the intro sections of the
day where the day's agenda is created.  These kinds of events have also been
the most fun conferences/meetings that I've attended.

What such an event does require is that people as a group have enough social
skills to know when it is appropriate to talk, and also to know when it is
appropriate to ask someone to stop talking until another time/place.  Good
moderators help a lot with that task.  Then we can have focused, productive
meetings without having to manage who can attend.  It also takes much less
pre-planning to run such an event, since the organizers do not need to work
out topics, schedules, etc.  Just space and overall timing (i.e. 5 rooms from
9am-6pm).

I am willing to serve as a moderator, though I can't say I'm the best at it.
I've helped organized and run DrupalCamp, MySQLCamp, iPhoneDevCamp, PdCon, and
more.

If there is a budget for this event, then Allen Gunn/Aspiration Tech could be
hired to run the event.  He's an excellent moderator, especially for groups of
people that are unfamiliar with this format.

.hc

Bob (Robert) Cavanaugh:
> Hi,
> Just a thought: Have a "Star chamber" meeting for the technical group, invitation only. After that have a 1/2 to 1 hour session open to all where the technical people can present their progress and invite comment. This way you have a focused working session with the key people, but maintain community trust by allowing general input.
> 
> Thanks,
>  
> Bob Cavanaugh
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Gnupg-users [mailto:gnupg-users-bounces at gnupg.org] On Behalf Of
>> fmv1992 at gmail.com
>> Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 5:24 AM
>> To: gnupg-users at gnupg.org; nico at enigmail.net
>> Subject: Re: How to deal with a 2nd OpenPGP Summit?
>>
>>
>>> ------------------------------
>>>
>>> Message: 3
>>> Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 07:44:24 +0200
>>> From: "nico at enigmail.net" <nico at enigmail.net>
>>> To: GnuPG-Users <Gnupg-users at gnupg.org>
>>> Subject: How to deal with a 2nd OpenPGP Summit?
>>> Message-ID: <55CADD38.5030603 at enigmail.net>
>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>>>
>>> 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
>>>
>>
>> Dear Nico,
>>
>> I think you are trying to achieve a compromise that is not possible. If I
>> understood correctly you are trying to reconcile developers interest with
>> layman's enthusiasm. I myself belong to the second group.
>> A good idea would be to organize one event for the developers and another
>> open event so everyone can join. Then I think everybody would be happy.
>> Note that some overlap between groups is expected and healthy for the
>> community.
>>
>> Kind regards,
>>
>> --
>> Felipe Martins Vieira
>> Public PGP key: http://pgp.surfnet.nl
>> Key Fingerprint: 9640 F192 63DA D637 6750 AC08 7BCA 19BB 0E69 E45D
> 
> 
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-- 
PGP fingerprint: 5E61 C878 0F86 295C E17D  8677 9F0F E587 374B BE81
https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x9F0FE587374BBE81