There were many places to hang this comment in this thread, but I'm going to hang here, because Eliot does make a very good point about too much noise.
I believe that there should be a list, it doesn't matter which one, to which every "participant" in the IETF is required to be subscribed.
What is sent to that list should be precisely the small subset of information it is considered absolutely necessary to know in order to participate meaningfully in the IETF. That means it needs to be:
- timely - if it's just for reference then the information should be clearly discoverable on the IETF website, not sent in an all-hands email. There should be a time-related element for why people need to know it NOW. "IETF 107 has been moved to online due to extenuating circumstances" is a good exemplar here.
either:
- a) new - something about how the IETF operates has changed, and everybody needs to know. Information such as "the RFC editor is now X", or "the Nomcom has appointed the following list of brave volunteers to the following roles" are good exemplars - knowing who to contact is important; or
- b) worthy of repeating - this is the kind of key highlight that (for example) I give in my quarterly presentations to staff at Fastmail. These are the key things you need to know to function, and here's where to look for more information.
- I would even include a monthly email with the key dates in the next month under this heading, just because it provides reminders, and is worth repeating.
- succinct - if 30,000 people are likely to read it, then it needs to just say the absolute minimum headline of "this is what you need to know, more information available at the following" and link to a page where more detail is available. e.g. "The NOTE-WELL has been updated to require everybody to wear business-professional clothing at all meetings - new notewell here, dress-code document here".
- actionable - reading this email should be enough for the person receiving it to understand whether they need to follow up and get more information.
The key goal should be that roughly-nobody (in the vein of rough consensus) feels that their time is wasted by reading emails to this list. They SHOULD NOT (maybe even MUST NOT) be duplicates of full emails sent to other lists - they are the headlines of must-know information and pointers to more detail, that's all.
Other than totally urgent things on the order of an IETF being rescheduled, I would say that a maximum of one post per week should be enough traffic for this kind of list.
And yes, I would say that full-IETF surveys (up to a maximum of a quite small number per year) are reasonable to send to such a list. The ability to survey your membership is very important to be able to serve them well and not just serve the loudest voices.
Regards,
Bron.
On Tue, Sep 28, 2021, at 01:36, Eliot Lear wrote:
Hi Lars,
I'm sorry, but this is a corollary to Housley's Law, which borrows from many, including Benjamin Franklin:
I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.
In an admirable effort to be transparent, we have inundated this list in particular with data. We now need to take the time to reduce that data to usable information. Please take another swing.
Eliot
On 27.09.21 12:59, Lars Eggert wrote:we discussed that (at length) in the IESG. There were very different opinions on which content should remain on ietf-announce and which should be moved elsewhere. I think I've seen signs in the feedback thread that there are probably very different views on that in the broader community as well. Hence the decision to propose a new mailing list.Attachments:
- OpenPGP_signature
--
Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
brong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
