On 8/17/20 6:23 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
3. Moving contentious issues to dedicated open lists does not suppress debate.
I disagree somewhat, at least for issues that impinge on multiple
areas of interest. Every new list that a participant has to
subscribe to in order to participate, is another impediment to
broad participation.
I readily agree that the vast majority of IETF participants don't
want to be bothered with administrative, policy, and process
issues (and shouldn't need to be bothered by such things) - unless
they perhaps threaten fundamental or significant changes to how
IETF works. The question in my mind is: How to identify those
issues, make the broader population aware of them, and make it
easy to participate should they choose to do so (without bothering
them if they don't)?
The low subscriber count to gendispatch is an indication that gendispatch isn't a great place to initially discuss, or dispatch, potentially controversial topics of widespread interest - precisely because its use in such instances would hide potentially controversial discussions from broad scrutiny. And by the time a WG gets chartered, it's generally too late to fix its scope.
Sure, WG charters under consideration are posted to
ietf-announce, but what percentage of participants really has time
to read everything that gets posted to ietf-announce? IMO that's
another barrier to effective participation.
IMO the problem is _mostly_ a tools problem. It seems like we
could do a lot better at making it easy for participants to be
aware of what's going on, without having to slog through enormous
numbers of email messages.
Keith
