John, I think there is something interesting to be learned from the last couple of weeks of these postings. My recollection is that, when Thomas started his version of the summaries, the main IETF list was an active forum for discussions of issues of importance to the IETF and the Internet. One could often get a sense of important issues being considered by the IETF just by reading that list, attending plenaries, and, before we dropped them, overview reports from each Area at the plenaries or in Proceedings. Yes, there was noise on it too, but the list was active and those more substantive discussions were going on. A decade ago, I could not have imagined a week in which there were only three postings (which occurred last week) or one in which there were 15 postings, each from a different person (this week). Perhaps that is a good sign, i.e., that the list traffic is not dominated by a few people posting rants and counter-rants in quick succession. But that behavior still occurs on IETF lists I'm watching (and, subjectively, I think it has gotten worse overall in recent years), so perhaps we have just shifted it elsewhere. This is, I think obviously, not just about the separation of Last Call discussions although those sometimes lead to more general ones that now do not show up anywhere else, but to larger trends of pushing topics that might be of general interest into silos for which one has to make a specific commitment to sign up for a list and follow. However, I wonder if we are not losing something by what appears to me to be a growing trend to separate discussion topics off into topic-specific lists and to do so fairly early in the life cycle of topics and clusters of discussions. I'm going to skip my usual long speculation and analysis and I understand that the tradeoffs are complicated, but I wonder if we, or at least the IESG (probably after its March composition is known) should be thinking about these issues as tradeoffs and what can be done to mitigate the liabilities. john --On Sunday, December 27, 2020 10:59 +0000 John Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Count | Bytes | Who > ------------+----------------+------- > 1 ( 6.7%) | 18109 (16.3%) | Stephan Wenger <stewe@xxxxxxxxx> > 1 ( 6.7%) | 14775 (13.3%) | tom petch <daedulus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > 1 ( 6.7%) | 9684 ( 8.7%) | Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> > 1 ( 6.7%) | 8237 ( 7.4%) | Abdussalam Baryun <abdussalambaryun@xxxxxxxxx> > 1 ( 6.7%) | 8173 ( 7.4%) | Keith Moore > <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> >...
