It struck me as a ridiculous decision (http://groups.drupal.org/node/21026) and almost (not really of course) made me regret writing the patch that allowed OG Panels to work with Panels 3 (http://drupal.org/node/307980#comment-1388214), but as the result of the "upgrade" GDO will no longer be supporting private content.
Openness is fantastic and the more the better, I think, but this poses an unique challenge for our planning. There is some content (vendor quotes, contact information, general discussion) that really cannot be public so we will have to move a portion of this show in private. The simple answer - through the proposal stage - is to move all our existing private work to Google Document.
Afterwards, we can roll our own Drupal site to manage everything. At Chapter Three we made an install profile to manage conferences for NASA so I am sure its 100% no worries.