How meetings work.

Chatham House Rule, every meeting

We say it out loud at the top of every session, and it governs everything that follows: anything said in the room can be repeated freely, but never attributed — not to the person who said it, and not to the company they said it about.

This is the load‑bearing rule. It's what lets you say "we're getting hammered by this bug on 7.4.x and support has been useless" without it landing on your account team's desk with your name on it. Your criticism travels. Your name doesn't.

In practice Feedback goes upstream as "several PNW shops are hitting X." Never as "Dave at Acme said X."

Your attendance is not a sales lead

The RSVP list lives with the steering committee and does not enter Fortinet's CRM. Not as a lead, not as an intent signal, not as a name passed quietly to a rep. No account team gets a list of who showed up. Nobody gets a follow‑up call because they attended.

This is the line we consider uncrossable. If it's ever crossed, the group has failed and it deserves to lose you.

A practitioner runs the room — not the vendor

Meetings are chaired by a member of the steering committee, who are practitioners, not Fortinet employees. They own the agenda, pick the speakers, and run the session.

Our Fortinet liaison attends as a participant and a resource, not as a host. He takes the questions, takes the criticism, and takes notes. He doesn't decide what gets discussed and he doesn't get a veto. He isn't going to leave the room and get a secondhand summary either — that would be theater, and it would make the feedback worse.

The feedback loop runs in both directions, in public

It isn't enough to promise your feedback goes somewhere. So we publish it: what we sent to Fortinet, and what came back. Anonymized, aggregated, and posted for the group to see.

If Fortinet gives us a real answer, you'll see it. If they give us nothing, you'll see that too. A feedback pipe you can't inspect is just a suggestion box.

Coming The first feedback log publishes after the inaugural meeting.

An anonymous channel, for what you won't say out loud

Some things you won't say with a Fortinet employee in the room, no matter what rule we invoke. That's fair. There's an anonymous form for exactly that, and what comes in through it goes upstream the same as anything else.

The group can call a vendor‑free session

If the steering committee decides a topic is better discussed without the vendor present, they call it and our liaison sits it out. That's their call to make, not a favor he grants. We'd rather build the exit door and never use it than discover we needed one.