--On Sunday, 26 September, 2021 10:13 +0200 Eliot Lear <lear@xxxxxxx> wrote: > "All problems in computer science can be solved by another > level of indirection" > > — Butler Lampson > > "All problems can be solved with an additional mailing > list." > > — The IESG > > Below > >> I have two different sources of mixed feelings about this. >> >> First, If we create an "important" list, will more people >> unsubscribe from the "announce" list? Is that the desired >> effect? If we do this experiment, will we monitor the >> "announce" list? > > I vaguely recall -announce being created for important > announcements. And now it seems that we have cluttered that > list. A better approach would be to unclutter it. Indeed. Let me suggest one small example: When a WG decides to schedule an interim meeting, that announcement should go to the WG list and _maybe_ to an Area-wide list for the relevant area, not to IETF-announce. Posting a calendar of upcoming meetings to IETF-announce every month or so would seem reasonable even though most of us know where to find that. I also hope that most of us have at least half-competent MUAs with either decent filtering capabilities, have gotten really good at finding and hitting the "delete" key, or both. Being more careful about the design of subject lines for automated announcements would help a lot with clutter management. For example, organizing subject lines something like Virtual meeting: <Area> <WG> <date and time info> would make it _much_ easier to filter things according to personal needs and inclinations than the current setup. We could also get better at dealing with the "only interested in one class of things" issue that Bron identified by thinking enough about metadata and categories enough that he (and I) are put at least risk of missing something that is really important to us because, for example, a decision was made many years ago that work related to the DNS was an Internet Area issue rather than an applications one and that work on email encryption was about Security and not email: in both cases much of it quite reasonably is, but some things aren't. So, while some tuning of the mailing lists may be appropriate, let's put more energy, as Eliot suggests, into reducing clutter rather than spreading it around. And let's try to improve information accessibility and the ability of people to selectively get the information they need and manage it while we are doing that. Finally, I don't share Ned's pessimism (at least one most days) and continue to believe that we should not make it extra-easy for people to narrowly focus on one specific topic or set of documents and ignore everything else. best, john
