Of all the talk about the upcoming G-20 Summit, very little of it concerns the actual summit itself. As in: what will all these world leaders really be doing in Pittsburgh next week?

The Pittsburgh Area Jewish Community hosted two policy wonks last night at Rodef Shalom to help explain the G-20: what it is, what good it can do, where it can become ineffective.

David Shorr from the Stanley Foundation drew a distinction between formal and informal meetings of international powers. The formal meetings — like the UN and the IMF — have legally binding charters and treaties, and members have veto power. The informal meetings — like the G-8 and the G-20 — are completely voluntarily: not legally binding.

The importance of the G-20, Shorr said, is that it brings heads of state together in one place, making it easier to discuss big issues that require collaboration among nations. He said this works well for 21st century problems, like climate change and global finance.

This more informal setting, though, can also keep the summit from accomplishing anything substantive. For instance, the “invite list” is always a major question. The host country gets to choose the attendees, and no one wants to offend anyone. So for the Pittsburgh Summit, the United States invited the “G-20,” which are 19 leading economies as well as the European Union, but also invited Spain and the Netherlands, and then a bunch of groups like the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, NEPAD and ASEAN.

So it’s really G-20 plus 2 plus 8.

Shorr and the Stanley Foundation have called for reforming the summit process, which they call G-X, to make it a better tool for getting things done. “We should be preparing for these summits by developing issues that are difficult, but ripe for some kind of progress, and putting those in front of the leaders,” Shorr told me before his talk.

Andrew Weiss with the RAND Corporation (who, incidentally, heaped tremendous praise on Rodef Shalom: “I’ve been to a lot of shuls. I’ve never seen anything like this shul. This is gorgeous.”) said the key to these summits is the documents, not the drama.

He said there will be “choreography,” “posturing” and “gamesmanship” over the next week, but that for months experts have quietly been meeting on what will become a “summit statement” issued by the heads of state following the Pittsburgh Summit.

(Here is the statement issued after the London Summit in April.)

“That’s really the substance of this,” Weiss said.

Shorr and Weiss got a lot of questions about Iran. One person asked whether the panelists believed Iran’s claims that its nuclear program is for peaceful energy uses, and, if not, what the international community could do to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

Shorr said we can’t take Iran at face value on its claim because “the road they are going down leads where it leads,” but he added that “if we are going to find a peaceful, diplomatic solution” that solution would probably include “some form of face saving having to do with the face value explanation.”

That theme came up a couple of times: that the world powers probably won’t be transparent in how they are handling Iran.

Shorr said any solution must include “intensive inspections regimes.” In other words: we can take Iran “at face value” to reach an agreement, but not for enforcing an agreement. According to Weiss, “The problem is that nobody believes what the Iranians say.”

We’ll have a full write up in the paper next week, on the opening day of the Summit.