On Thu, Sep 30, 2021, at 11:00, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
On 30-Sep-21 12:07, Barry Leiba wrote:>> I'm arguing that Last Call messages are of such importance to the>> standards-making goal of the IETF that we really do have to send them>> to as much of the community as we can.>> The trouble with that is that if you really believe that and take it completely, we would be posting last-call announcements to every mailing list we have: all the WG lists, all the non-WG lists, all the lists that remain from closed groups, and whatever else. I think few of us wouldlike that.>> If my last sentence is correct, then we really do have to understand that it’s more important to make sure that participants understand the importance of last call and where to find the last-call announcements… and then leave it to the community to do what they’re willing to do with that. And that does not meal trying to force those announcements on people who don’t want them.>> It was different when the IETF was smaller. We need to accept that things have changed.Absolutely. But that's exactly why I'm banging on about last calls, because the IETF is bigger than it was in 1995 and because we have multiple silos. I'm all in favour of reducing mundane announcements, so that people actually see the ones from outside their silo that are not mundane.
Of course, this mailing list is already a self-selected subset of the IETF community (and even more subsetted after the dramas of $currentyear +/- N), and that's the subset who are happy to deal with mail volume.
So the only real way to find out what would be effective at communicating to with those who are NOT choosing to be on our current lists would be to survey a statistically viable number of them and find out!
My first suggestion would be to individually email a simple questionnaire to everybody who registers for IETF112 plus everybody who has posted a draft in the past year but is NOT on ietf-announce and ask them why they aren't out of a set of possible answers or "other". But this suggestion is shooting from the hip.
What I do NOT think is of any real value is the high-email-volume-ophiles in this list making predictions, and I'm going to reluctantly lump myself into that group too - I've been extrapolating from the relatively small number of people I know who are in the "not on the announce list" category, and that's not good science.
Bron.
--
Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
brong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
