I guess I am going to be the one to follow the lead of earlier comments and try to move this to the IETF list. For those on that list and not of dispatch@xxxxxxxx, a discussion about the development of some particular work that was presented in the DISPATCH WG last week and evolved into a discussion of how the IETF does work and generational differences in the communication mechanisms various people find useful (or even acceptable). If what follows does not provide enough context, the relevant archives are at https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/dispatch/ Inline below. --On Monday, April 3, 2023 10:02 -0400 Manu Sporny <msporny@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm just not sure that working through the mailing lists are > in the same league of expected infrastructure by the younger > generations. :) Again, as a data point, for the Multiformats > work, mailing list engagement has been a challenge, where > Github, Google Doc, Slack, and Signal engagement has been much > easier. > > Again, just a data point, no need to debate it on dispatch. Let me give you a different datapoint (speaking as one of those first-generation IETF --and ARPANET/Internet protocols even earlier-- types but not for anyone else)... Describing this situation as a generational one misses an important point. One of the historical strengths of the IETF is that it brings together people from a wide variety of perspectives. That is one thing that makes it different from a collection of people working together to develop and/or promote a protocol (or other work) on a specific topic. That model has contributed significantly to our being able to produce higher-quality output because it raises the odds of someone being able to notice a problem external to the discussions of the narrower group and say "hey, that will work fine as long as everyone is part of the same club but it is not very robust against X" or "that would be ok except that it conflicts with Y or would mess up Z". Those are among the reasons we have often encouraged people to drop in on meetings of WGs with which they are not actively involved (an advantage of f2f rather than entirely or mostly remote meetings), why WG Internet-Drafts are announced broadly rather than just to the WG, and why we do IETF Last Calls on documents. While others may disagree, I (and historically others) have suggested that having a small number of editors or authors for a given document, ones who receive input from others and take directions from WGs, usually produces better and more coherent and comprehensible output than editing by committee. Tools like Github --and Github specifically-- pose a problem for that model. In my experience, it is great for an effort in which everyone involved is actively collaborating, watching developments more or less in real time (or at least daily) and expecting to read almost every transaction. By contrast, for someone trying to look in on work occasionally to get a sense of status, what the issues are, etc., it can be extremely hard to follow -- to the point of discouraging such efforts. Perhaps that, too, is a generational issue, but I have not found it a problem for efforts I follow closely. Unless it is a generational issue --in which case folks in the IETF who are concerned with education and outreach had best increase their skills and efforts to teach old dogs new tricks -- it may be getting close to time for us to consider whether those goals of getting broad perspectives into work and getting it early are still relevant. best, john
