I have mixed feelings about this.
I am all for having a way to reduce the amount of email that I received
and that I don't care about, and the vast majority of Last Calls that
IETF has these days are not things I am likely to want to dig into.
But separating the Last Call list from the IETF list doesn't really help
that. What I'd like is a way to subscribe to Last Calls in specific
areas or working groups. Or if the announcements had a bit of extra
metadata attached to the messages, e.g. working group name and area, I
could use SIEVE to show me only the last call announcements that I care
about. Then having a separate last call list would become beneficial
at least for those who could use SIEVE (admittedly, and sadly, probably
a small fraction of IETF).
It also bothers me that the conversation around a particular last call
(other that private feedback) isn't all in some place that people can
easily read it and contribute to it.
There also seems to be a disturbing trend toward over-fragmentation of
the IETF community conversation, for instance the now-common admonition
to move nearly every substantive discussion of potentially-broad
community interest to a separate narrowly-focused list to which one has
to explicitly subscribe. I do not think this serves IETF's interests,
and I think it too often serves to hide issues which should have wider
exposure. Separating last call announcements is probably among the
least of the factors contributing to that over-fragmentation, but I
think it nonetheless contributes to the problem.
For the most part it doesn't bother me to not have last call
announcements cluttering up the conversation on the ietf list... except
that sometimes those conversations do need community-wide attention.
Looking through my lastcall mail folder, what I see is that it's hard to
find the Last Call announcements for all of the area directorate reviews
that have been posted (with different subjects, and without links to the
drafts being reviewed). IMO the list would be MUCH more valuable if it
could arrange to group all of the traffic for any given Last Call
together. The most likely way to make this work with most mail user
agents is for all of those reviews to use the same Subject field as the
original announcement, and for all of those reviews to be replies to the
original announcement. (Yes, it's sad that too few MUAs have effective
searching.)
If I had to assign a number to the current implementation, I'd probably
give it a 1.5, but slight changes could make it a 4 or better.
What I'd really like to see is some more thought put into the question
"How do we make it more likely that Last Calls (not just the
announcements) get the attention they deserve?" I think it's possible
that one effect of putting last call announcements on a separate list,
is that Last Calls now get even less attention than before.
Keith
On 4/30/20 11:00 AM, Barry Leiba wrote:
It's been around six months since we started the <last-call@xxxxxxxx>
list, and we said that we would evaluate the results after six months.
To that end, the IESG would like to see comments about how it's been
working.
Please respond to this thread to comment. It would be helpful if the
first line of your comment gave a succinct view of your opinion on the
following 5-to-1 scale:
5: Perfect! Don't even think about going back!
4: I really like it and want to keep it.
3: Neutral: I don't care either way.
2: I don't like it, but I can live with it if we decide to keep it.
1: It's terrible! Please, please go back to the old way!
And, of course, if you have further comments beyond those numbers,
include those as well. We want to know what you think. Comments,
please, in the next couple of weeks, by 15 May. Thanks!
Barry, for the IESG
