Andy (and Jay and IESG et al), Thank you very much -- for the note, for your archives and search skills being better than mine -- and for confirming that I wasn't dreaming about this. That is almost certainly the thread I remembered. Of course, although I see some notes questioning the idea of registration at all (and providing opinions about whether whether the registration questions were "intrusive") much of that thread (which I only vaguely recalled even after reviewing it) is about "for free" and not about "register or not". The question that was asked was about "participation" and not whether or not people could observe/lurk. In https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/Jn3xElLN5YIe1VNcYAJKoqqcsQQ/, I wrote, in part, "I continue to believe that we should allow people to anonymously observe/ lurk and to review archives and stored videos" (note "and to review", not "or to review"). A second note from me, https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/Rgeg8QwN7qMnpZW761JDpSu9Kug/ is very much about "participants", not observers/lurkers, a point that appears to have been made or supported by others at several other parts of the thread (I am not interpreting silence as consent, only that it wasn't a major part of the conversation). Alissa's two notes toward the end of the thread (the one you cited and https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/RTnJuy0lej1-5TiGcZtWWPgXE6o/) confirm the "not a major part" inference by not mentioning it. The later message from me that you cited is entirely about participants. Maybe I should have called out the observer/lurker distinction yet again, but may have assumed (based on the rest of the thread and any side-conversations that might have occurred) that no one was objecting to the distinction and/or the idea that people should be able to continue to lurk in real time, observing the dynamic of the meetings which, btw, neither the the YouTube recordings nor the audio entirely capture. Jay, It is easy to read that thread as being almost entirely about participants and hence irrelevant to the current discussion about observers/lurkers. It is even easier to read Alissa's final note as requiring that everyone who wants to look at the Meetecho stream must register, but I note that message does say "and we will instead include a link to the audio stream for those who do not want to register". One could argue, as Pete points out, that the little headset icon provides that functionality, but, given the discussion in the 2017 thread, I believe the intent was to make that option clearly and obviously available, not something that one would see _only_ if they tried to accessed sessions via the HTML form of the agenda rather than, e.g., getting a link from somewhere else. _That_ requirement could reasonably be satisfied by explicitly saying, on the Meetecho login page, "if you want to observe in real time without participating, download the slides and use the audio stream". It would ideally provide links to get to that stream and the slides for the meeting which they are trying to access but, at worst, explicitly pointing to the agenda page and telling them which icon to look for would probably be ok. However, things change and things have changed a lot since 2017, including introducing fully online and then explicitly hybrid meetings. Asking the questions again (as, obviously, people --I now presume including you but had not made that inference before-- have done) seems entirely appropriate. Coming up with different answers should be no surprise to any of us. However, as I tried to say before, I think the key issue here is not the semi-legalistic history of formal consensus calls and decisions (and whether my memory was right or wrong about that). Instead, it is the broader issue of how we make decisions in cases like this and, in particular, whether the broader community --not just one WG or team-- should be consulted before decisions are made or, at least, advised and given a chance to comment or appeal such a decision. It seems to me that is important and, consequently, that declaring questions moot is not helpful. IESG, You may disagree but it seems to me that changes to who (including observers/lurkers whom we have never considered "participants") can access an IETF meeting and under what circumstances has potential significant impact on the standards process. Did you review and sign off on this change? If you need an example of the type of person who might want to lurk --with real-time access to the meeting including visibility into the chat and participants lists -- and where locking them out of that might be bad for the IETF, I'm happy to discuss offlist. thanks. john --On Wednesday, July 27, 2022 15:25 -0400 "Andrew G. Malis" <agmalis@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Jay, John, et al, > > Please see the conversation starting at > https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/ARWs2NaG1mOh2a6In4h > gTtfH9vI/ . Herein, Alyssa requested feedback on a proposal to > require free registration for remote participants, and for > that registration to be required for Meetecho access. Prior to > this (May 2017), anyone could log into Meetecho using made-up > credentials if they wished. > > John, you contributed to this conversation (see > https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/BLZ-IfIWKuB4vpqbz8B > i9yme6Ho/ in particular), In this email, you argued in favor > of the proposal. > > In > https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/nxDHpprMppNQPKkA18F > cZ75_GfM/ , Alyssa declared consensus in favor of the proposal. > > Cheers, > Andy
