On 9/25/21 3:57 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
Bron, that isn't the point. Of course no individual can be expected to comment on the subject matter of every last-called draft. But the whole point (and here I am much less pessimistic than Ned Freed) is to awaken the interest of someone who simply hasn't been aware of a draft but who does happen to have sufficient knowledge to find unexpected issues. If our area review teams plus GenArt were 100% perfect, this wouldn't be necessary, but they aren't. There are maybe 300 IETF Last Calls per year. I calculate that the ones I ignore cost me about 600 seconds per year to glance at the message and hit the delete key. I can identify four drafts where I've sent comments in response to an IETF Last Call in the past year (not counting WGs that I track and my own GenArt reviews). I have no idea whether that is typical.
If I understand your points, I think you're both right. Yes, having the potential for broad review is important. But for most readers, most of the Last Call announcements are irrelevant. This makes it harder to see the Last Call announcements that matter to them.
If we could subscribe to only Last Call announcements for particular WGs and/or particular areas, maybe we would get more Last Call feedback and our documents would benefit from more community reviews.
It's also not clear to me that we really need to have each LC announcement in a separate email, or that all subscribers should see them in that form.
As a thought experiment, I could imagine an announce-AREA list where there is one such list for every area that would see Last Calls, new proposed groups, group charter messages, etc. Similarly, a announce-WG list for each WG, so that people could watch for LC announcements and meeting announcements from any particular WG. Or, as I and others have suggested, let each user choose exactly which kinds of announcements they wish to get email about.
The point is, it's really not difficult to do a better job of informing our community of relevant events than we do.
(and for those who think we shouldn't be creating "bespoke" software, my response is that innovating with the Internet is actually IETF's core function, that eating our own dogfood keeps us honest, and we shouldn't leave this to Big Corporations.)
Keith
