On 4/22/21 4:59 PM, Adam Roach wrote:
On 4/22/21 15:40, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
Tom,
Last, comments from organised review teams should be sent to the last
call list as opposed to being made available to the community.
The last call list *is* available to the community, so this is just
being more specific about what "available to the community" means.
Is that a problem?
More pointedly -- it lets folks see discussions of IETF work product
without them getting lost among (checks notes) 150 messages about a
New York Times article, 132 posts about QUIC and DNSSEC, and 234
messages about inclusiveness.
I'm not necessarily saying these topics aren't worth discussing; but
it's important to get broad consensus on the documents we publish as
RFCs, and we can't afford to lose those conversations under the crush
of high-volume topics. The risk of documents in last call getting lost
in the noise is far more of a barrier to being "available to the
community" than the use of a dedicated mailing list.
One can credibly make the opposite argument also: that it's hard to find
the time/patience to scan all of the Last Call discussions that happen,
just so you can be "in the loop" for the relatively rare Last Call
discussions that seem important to you.
More generally: one person's "noise" that one can get "lost in" is, to
another person, a topic of vital importance to the organization. And
there's a risk of putting all discussions in narrow silos, which is
reduced awareness on the part of participants of the breadth of the
organization's activities and influences, and also (especially with
gendispatch) reduced awareness of the changes people are trying to make
to the organization itself.
I understand why people wanted last-call@ but I think it's more of a
sideways step, maybe slightly backwards also, than a step forward.
What I'd really like to see is the ability to subscribe to Last Call
discussions on a per-wg, per-topic, or per-area basis. Because I often
identify particular WGs or discussions that will be interesting to me in
some way, and would definitely like to review their drafts, but don't
have enough time to read all of their mailing list traffic. Of course
I'm perfectly capable of writing code to filter the various lists and
rearrange their output to better suit me. But the way we present this
information to participants by default does affect how our organization
works, and not necessarily for the better.
Keith
