#bbcsms: Chatham House Rule

The irony of holding today's #bbcsms workshops under the Chatham House Rule did not escape us when we made the decision.

When we started planning the two-day social media summit, we knew we wanted to bring media - mainstream and social - from all over the world together to share learning, experiences and to formulate useful outcomes that could help everyone working in this field.

On that basis we devised a format, which we have blogged about over the past month, that we hope will enable us to do that - a small invited group discussion today followed by a wider public session tomorrow.

Today's workshops focus on how national and international news organisations are incorporating social media in their reporting and their newsrooms. The invited guests are representatives of those organisations. In order to enable participants to speak freely at today's session without fear of being taken out of context, we decided that we should use the globally recognised Chatham House Rule, a principle that governs many similar sessions. Tweeting unattributably falls comfortably within it.

The questions and learning that comes out of today's discussions will be directly incorporated into Day Two, and we will be posting summaries of the key points that have been made on this blog. Tomorrow we will be tackling the wider questions around social media and journalism in an open forum that includes a wide range of individuals.

That is not to say that this doesn't throw up some idiosyncrasies in today's tweets from #bbcsms, but I guess that is the joy of social media.