Chatham House
Feb. 8th, 2008 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhythmaningI went to a lecture this week, which I fully intend to write about later; it was a fascinating account of an organisation in crisis.
The thing is, at the end of the talk and before questions were taken, the chairman - he was professor of investment or something - said "of course, this lecture takes place under Chatham House rules".
He hadn't said this at the beginning; may may have meant to, but he didn't.
This was happening in Edinburgh University Management School; it was a full lecture theatre; there were many people who had been typing into their laptops throughout the whole meeting, whilst all this interesting, and suddenly possibly confidential, stuff was being talked about.
I couldn't work out if the professor was ignorant of the modern world, or just stupid. True, all these people could have been looking at their webmail, or downloading tunes or arranging their social lives. Or sitting on their blogs, writing what the CEO of a FTSE100 was telling us.
This just annoyed me; I had been taking notes (and trusting in prudence) and suddenly I felt I had been doing something wrong.
Happily, I ignored the professor. I don't believe anything I noted isn't in the public domain, but fuck it, if it is, not my fault: I was listening, not talking.
The thing is, at the end of the talk and before questions were taken, the chairman - he was professor of investment or something - said "of course, this lecture takes place under Chatham House rules".
He hadn't said this at the beginning; may may have meant to, but he didn't.
This was happening in Edinburgh University Management School; it was a full lecture theatre; there were many people who had been typing into their laptops throughout the whole meeting, whilst all this interesting, and suddenly possibly confidential, stuff was being talked about.
I couldn't work out if the professor was ignorant of the modern world, or just stupid. True, all these people could have been looking at their webmail, or downloading tunes or arranging their social lives. Or sitting on their blogs, writing what the CEO of a FTSE100 was telling us.
This just annoyed me; I had been taking notes (and trusting in prudence) and suddenly I felt I had been doing something wrong.
Happily, I ignored the professor. I don't believe anything I noted isn't in the public domain, but fuck it, if it is, not my fault: I was listening, not talking.
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no subject
Date: 2008-02-10 12:33 am (UTC)The good news is that Chatham House Rules is commonly misunderstood to mean that you cannot repeat anything you hear outside the room. In fact, CHR means you CAN use it, you just can't attribute it. Which is not to say this guy shouldn't have warned everyone at the start, but then perhaps he let something in particular slip that he was not intending to...