The Two Takeoff Meetings were focused on problems with a narrow(ish) focus that affected people who already thought of themselves as part of a Craft in some way.
LAWST1's topic was officially "to discuss patterns of success and failure in development of maintainable black box regression test suites." Informally, my no-doubt-exaggerated memory is that everyone came having had disappointing results, sure that someone there would have The Secret.
I don't remember the official invitation to the Snowbird Workshop, but I remember there were two fairly specific topics:
1. This is a group of people all approaching software development in an unconventional way. It *feels* like they have something in common. What?
2. Marketing. The methods have been called "lightweight methods." Calling someone or something "a lightweight" is not a term of praise. We need a better name.