Second, who exactly defines what is important?The current proposal is that important-news would have all manual postings by the various organizational roles, i.e., everything under (1): 1. Announcements sent manually 34 by the IETF Chair/ED 39 the IAB Chair 0 the IRTF Chair 0 the Chair of the LLC Board 136 the IETF Executive Director 20 the NomCom Chair 13 the IETF Tools support 3 IANA 1 ISOC 38 and the IETF Secretariat We would ask those posters to determine on a case-by-case basis whether a given announcement meets their bar for important-news or nor.
As I wrote before, a lot of those belong to something like "a log
of the IETF". I think this would be better treated as publishing a
log on an IETF web page, with possibly a weekly or monthly
reminder.
Is that another way to empower people in elected positions, relative to the average participant?I'm not sure I follow. The "average participant" cannot post to ietf-announce now, and they wouldn't be able to post to important-news either. That ability was always restricted to certain org roles?
You are right. But I am still concerned with the asymmetry of
sending data through one-way lists. Take two recent messages on
the ietf-announce list:
1) Reminder: IETF 112 Birds of a Feather (BOF) proposals due by 10
September
2) Proposed Experiment for IETF 112: Moving the Plenary
The first one clearly belongs in some kind of "log of events" category. Having that sent to a one-way list like "ietf-announce" makes sense -- although I would still prefer handling that as a web page. The second one proposes an experiment and calls for comments. Both messages were sent to several mailing lists: ietf-announce with copies to 112all and ietf for the first one, ietf-announce with copies on wgchairs, 112all and ietf for the second.
That seems like message inflation, and I believe we would be better off with some simple rule. The send-only ietf-announce list looks right for the first message: it is an annoucement, no discussion is expected. On the other hand, if discussions are expected, it would be better to just send them on the list where those discussions are supposed to take place -- probably the IETF list. Unless the goal is to have parallel discussions on several different lists.
-- Christian Huitema
