On 2/25/21 6:49 PM, Salz, Rich wrote:
So... mailing list are seen as a problematic mechanism to carry our work? For some people I think the answer is yes. It seems that overall use of email is declining, but it's hard to get real numbers without getting tangled up in email marketing newsletter business.
Some people prefer other ways of collaborating, and email also seems worse than it used to be. As far as I can tell there are many reasons for that: mobile devices have resulted in reduced attention spans (who wants to read and mark up an Internet-Draft over a phone?), increasingly inconsistent user experience from one user to another, poor support for plain text, spam, a tendency of lots of different programs to clutter email with low-value notifications, etc.
It's still hard to beat email for IETF's purposes, though: it's very accessible and inclusive, low cost, doesn't require proprietary interfaces, easy to archive (and allows storage of arbitrary metadata in the message header), searchable, can use it without risk of vendor lockin, and seems to offer less risk to participants' privacy than other collaboration tools.
More generally I think the very nature of IETF - collaboration between large numbers of individuals from all over the planet and working in a wide variety of environments - inevitably requires some compromises. We will sometimes need to use tools that aren't our first choices, and we may need to use those tools differently than we'd use, say, with co-workers at our employers. We can probably adapt and improve those interfaces over time, but some balance will need to be maintained because the same tool that optimizes one person's experience is likely to pessimize someone else's.
Keith
