Hi Keith, I find myself confused by some of the things herein, so I'll try to adopt the strategy of "summarize what I am hearing and then respond to the summary" as needed. On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 01:08:12PM -0400, Keith Moore wrote: > 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). That seems clear to me, and worth pursuing. > 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. I'm not sure in what way this is the case; it sounds to me like you are saying that the last-call disucssion of a particular document is fragmented across many places in the current experiment's setup. I honestly am not sure what those places would be (that is to say, I have been assuming that last-call@ captures all of it), since the directorate reviews sent via the datatracker go to all three of the WG list, last-call@, and the directorate list, and the last-call announcements set reply-to to last-call@. While I have occasionally seen directorate review threads that drop one or two of the lists, it is in my experience the exception, so I'd like to learn more about how your perception differs from mine. > 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 I think I understand your point here and sympathize that forcing a discussion to split off from its current forum can result in the subsequent discussion occurring among a too-narrow group of participants that does not reach a conclusion reflective of the broader community's interests. But it doesn't always do so, and there are many factors to be balanced in analyzing what's best; I'm not sure that this current thread about the particular ongoing experiment with last-call@ is the right place to get into the broader discussion. > least of the factors contributing to that over-fragmentation, but I > think it nonetheless contributes to the problem. Here you say "separating last call announcements", which confuses me. In what way are the *announcements* separated; my understanding is that they continue to go to ietf-announce@, unchanged by the current experiment. > 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. Again, the announcements should be going to ietf-announce@, so I'm not sure how the ietf list comes in. > 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 I see you saying that directorate review mails are being sent with inconsistent subject lines and without links to the drafts. My understanding is that the directorate secretaries are pushing reviewers to have the datatracker send the review mail, which standardizes on the message format and subject line (though apparently does not specifically include a link to the document, which should be easy to rectify; please feel free to file a ticket). So I'd be interested in knowing what timescale your search spanned, and especially (though I acknowledge this is not a trivial request) how the distribution has changed over time. > 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.) Agreed that using a common subject line (or substring?) seems cheap and effective. I do wonder if it is useful to call out directorate reviews and/or provide other ways to distinguish different reviewers' threads for the same document, hence my suggestion of substring vs. full subject match. > 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. I don't have a great sense for which of the potential changes discussed in this thread would be needed to make it a 4 in your view. (I'm not going to hazard a guess, either, since I'd expect to be wrong.) > 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. I agree that the question of getting last calls more attention is important. But once again, I request clarity on the specifics of "the announcements" which, AFAIK, are only changed by this current experiment in the form of the "reply-to" setting. Thanks, Ben > > 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 > > >
