Ron Seybold wrote:

> I've been less clear than I need to be about this. More plainly put,
> when an IT manager comes back to the office and reports NDA
> information he or she has heard to other IT staff, top management of
> their company, or to colleagues in other offices, nobody at Interex
> will complain. Who will know, and then implement the enforcement?
> Interex expects this kind of illegal nondisclosure to happen.

This is only illegal if the NDA is signed to a person, not a corporation.
NDAs I have seen are signed at the corporate level, making it legal
to share NDA information within the recipient's corporation. And in
my experience people attending NDA presentations are *expected* to
share the information when they get home.

> But when a reporter goes back to the keyboard to break the NDA in the
> same way, there's public evidence of the disclosure. Because the
> press speaks in a voice that carries further, we're expected to honor
> NDAs that individual IT managers and organizations can ignore.

Correct. Otherwise the NDA has no value.

> It's hard to imagine a level of NDA monitoring and enforcement where
> Interex won't accept paid registrations from IT managers who have
> previously broken NDAs by telling their companies what they heard at
> Interex. It's not hard at all to imagine Interex reading reports from
> the press afterward, then being selective about whose credentials are
> approved at the next conference. And obviously, there will be no full
> Interex transcripts of these NDA sessions. That wipes out information
> for Interex members who can't attend the shows.

And don't have NDAs.

I'm not arguing for or against NDAs as a concept, but I do think there is value
in NDA presentations, and if Interex as a user group can get leading
edge information to a subset of its membership using this vehicle,
that may be valuable.

> Any NDA amounts to limiting the work of the press.

Correct. That may or may not be a "bad" thing.

 > This is the first
> time in this user group's history that its chairman feels like he
> will need NDAs to get HP's communication of strategic information.

I would contend that "strategic information" that has been shared in
the past at Interex events has been heavily sanitized for public
consumption. If Interex can deploy a tool to leverage more information
for its membership, that might be a good thing, at least for some
subset of the members.

> It's a slippery slope that Interex has taken, downward and away from
> independence. As a member, I'd like to know how those board members
> running for election this month feel about this.

I'll copy Dillon on this - I'm sure Denys has already seen it.

--
Greg Cagle
gregc at gregcagle dot com

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