When it comes to cybersecurity, 250 heads are better than one. The first annual Global Cyber Innovation Summit will be held in Baltimore in early May 2019, and those constituting the invite-only crowd might find themselves rubbing shoulders with an 18-member advisory council consisting of former government officials, chief information security officers and policy experts to boot.

The summit joins an expanding list of other similarly-themed panels like the Paris Internet Governance Forum that have popped up in the last decade as cybersecurity has been informally reclassified from an IT headache to a matter of serious enterprise risk.

“When you talk about cybersecurity, you talk about almost an arms race mentality of good guys vs. bad guys. And the bad guys, technically, are just as capable as the good guys and phenomenally well-motivated, and so we can't sit back and be reactive. We can't sit back in a silo trying to figure it out by ourselves,” chairman Bob Ackerman said.

Keeping pace with the outlaws of cyber country is one of the reasons that Ackerman and his collaborators wanted to facilitate the event. The advisory panel wanted to start with a “clean piece of paper,” which means that they can't cite any specific inspirations from other cyber-themed panels throughout the globe.

Even the Paris Internet Governance Forum—an international gathering of experts and practitioners held in Paris last week—tends to cast a broader eye towards issues pertaining to Internet policy and the role of governments. But the U.S. summit looks to take a more risk-oriented approach.

“All of the rules that we've come to expect in civilized society don't apply. There's no sheriff in cyberspace. There's no jurisdiction in cyberspace. So we're having to fundamentally rethink this domain in which all of our activities now transpire,” Ackerman said.

That still leaves plenty on the table worth talking about, and to help unpack it all, Ackerman and company are planning to recruit a small but diverse group of guests that represent a wide variety of industries and cyber experiences.

The advisory panel itself already ticks boxes for airlines, utilities and healthcare. Rajesh De, who leads the cybersecurity and data privacy practice at Mayer Brown, brings some legal expertise to the roster. A panel of Fortune 100 CEO's will discuss “Cyber Security: Perspectives from the C-Suite,” while other panels are expected to include “Emerging New Threat Landscapes” and “Cybersecurity Through Data Science.”

Coordination—even between seemingly unrelated as disciplines—becomes more important as innovations and corporate defense playbooks continue to trickle down down.

“The bad guys only need to be right every once in a while. The good guys need to be right in stopping them every single time, and so we need to get really, really smart about how we share all of our knowledge and all of our experience so that collectively we can be more effective,” Ackerman said.

One of the ways that the summit hopes to distinguish itself is by taking a less reactive approach to the great big question mark that is cybersecurity. Being able to anticipate what's coming makes it easier to frame the problems of the present and begin defining the roles of the future.

“What we want to start doing is saying how do we get ahead of this and how do we begin to frame the problem, so that we can manage it and understand who's responsible, and begin having more forward-thinking conversations about how we get off defense and get on offense,” Ackerman said.