PSA: Chatham House rule is a tradeoff that is optimal for exactly one thing, and in all other situations is anti-helpful. The one thing is analyzing complex & controversial topics among a group of loosely-affiliated individuals. This is what Chatham House is for.
Chatham House Rule is wrong for whole conferences
7 tweets · June 2023 · 79 likes · 2 retweets · read on Twitter
Note that even Chatham House doesn't use its famous eponymous rule most of the time. Usually meetings are kept on the record, and the Rule is only invoked "occasionally". Source: their site. chathamhouse.org/about-us/chath…
I went to a conference that attempted to put the whole conference under CHR. First off, this was a shitshow because they failed to make it common knowledge, which 100% breaks CHR as a system. It might have been... ok... if they'd used it only for the scheduled topic discussions
But applying it to the whole conference would technically make networking near impossible, because it would imply that I can't even say to my team "I talked with Named Person and they said they'd like to collaborate with us" because that's a violation of Chatham House Rule!
Now obviously I could ask that person's permission, but this is awkward, so in practice people won't do this and therefore many people will be in violation of this rule and this is predictable and therefore the rule can't be assumed to be in effect.
TL;DR Chatham House Rule may make sense in very limited contexts for surfacing sensitive information, but as a blanket policy it undermines relationship-building as well as rule-following in general.
If you understand information theory and common knowledge, this means it's almost certainly a bad idea to attempt to apply CHR to your whole event/retreat/conference. And if you DO want to, you need to ensure COMMON KNOWLEDGE of INTENT to follow it, not just declare it.