I’ve attended one event under Chatham House rules. Not only was keeping who was there a secret costly, but people reliably considered it unreasonable that I actually kept that secret. “Oh, come on” and variants were used often, because actually keeping to the rule was annoying and they didn’t see the point.
People treating it as unreasonable does make keeping the rule even more expensive, and raises the probability it will be ignored—I believe others took the information part seriously but not the who was there part. But that also makes it really important we find a way to do the full no-one-knows-you-are-there thing when you need to do it, without it giving away that there was true need for it. If you say who attended until the moment you really can’t say, you’re doing Glomarization / Meta-Honesty wrong...
I’ve attended one event under Chatham House rules. Not only was keeping who was there a secret costly, but people reliably considered it unreasonable that I actually kept that secret. “Oh, come on” and variants were used often, because actually keeping to the rule was annoying and they didn’t see the point.
People treating it as unreasonable does make keeping the rule even more expensive, and raises the probability it will be ignored—I believe others took the information part seriously but not the who was there part. But that also makes it really important we find a way to do the full no-one-knows-you-are-there thing when you need to do it, without it giving away that there was true need for it. If you say who attended until the moment you really can’t say, you’re doing Glomarization / Meta-Honesty wrong...