Toerless, I am personally pretty firmly in the keep-things-open camp. But I’ll observe two things. First, as you saw there was some discussion about interactions where it has been believed that Chatham house rules have been useful. That has indeed been the case a few times, though certainly not needed for every event. But as a frequent member of the program committees in these events, I want to highlight another point which may not be readily visible if you just look at the text of these workshop descriptions. Yes, these events are by invitation only, and there’s a request to send a position paper or abstract to the organisers, and based on that an invitation may be forthcoming. However, while this sounds quite closed, in practice for most of the events — particularly the virtual ones -- we tend to invite everyone who demonstrated that they were on topic and had thought about the matter enough to write a rational contribution. Perhaps not quite everyone every time, but still. And the program committees tend to use the contributions also for other things, such as deciding who we might ask to lead a session. IAB workshops generally aren’t everyone-presents-their-paper conferences, the papers are required reading before starting the actual workshop. We do want to generate discussion, however, so the general thrust is to ensure that we get a set of people together who can constructively discuss the topic and take it forward. Jari
