I think this is a more sensible approach.  Most of us have had experience on PDPs with one or more disrupters.....wasting a lot of people's time being difficult, and we have a packed agenda at this meeting, it is our big chance to make progress face to face.  Open records is a lot different than open forum, and we can always allow audio listen in, with texted questions permitted.

Stephanie Perrin

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Hi Ed,

I wasn't actually thinking of closed/open here in terms of secrecy
at all, only about keeping the meetings manageable.

In other (non-ICANN) contexts I've experience with people trying
deliberately disrupt meetings or to hijack them to their own
irrelevant agendas, but even with well-intentioned people meetings get
harder to manage as the number or participants grows, all the way down
to finding big enough room for all. And in negotiations between two
or more groups the number of participants from each side also matters.

I would be 100% in favour of releasing recordings and transcripts of
these meetings publicly as well as letting the whole world listen in,
but making them fully open in terms of participation is not quite as
easy. In practice I expect we'll let in any interested people as long
as space allows, but if we run out of space and some rule is needed to
select who gets in, preferring our own members seems reasonable to me.

Your offer to help in crowd management is welcome, although I suspect
the situation is a bit different in a rock concert than in an ExCom
meeting in a room with space for only 10 people or so.

As for who we need to ask in the cases under discussion, first the
ExComs of NCSG, NCUC and NPOC, then in NCPH case the CSG and in our
leaders' meeting with Board the Board members in question.

I don't really expect any of them to object to transparency, but they
might be hesitant in allowing unlimited and unpredictable number of
actual participants. It certainly has been the case before that we've
had to carefully balance the number of NCSG and CSG participants,
for example.