Noel Chiappa wrote: > > From: Andrew Sullivan <ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > > > This means that those "driving by" have to be tolerated, I think. > > Ah, no. > > Because if organizing an email campaign works for the FSF, next thing you > know, BigCorp X will be telling everyone who works for it 'we want standard Q > approved, please send email to the IETF list about that'. If we allow > ourselves to be influenced by a mass email campaign, all we are doing is > virtually guaranteeing that we will get more. So I think we have an active > interest is responding _negatively_ to such campaigns. I don't think we have to do anything special to respond negatively to such campaigns. Basically we're all dealing with information overload anyway, which provides plenty of incentive to prune irrelevant sources. The more messages that we receive from people who either appear to be parroting, or don't seem to have actually read the relevant documents enough to understand the issues, the more difficult it will be for anyone who has to gauge consensus or technical soundness to find the rare new and valid point that might be made by some contributor to that campaign. > Rather than adopt indirect measures (such as requiring people to be registered > users of a list), I would go straight to the heart of the matter, and adopt a > formal policy that a mass email campaign should count _against_ the position > taken by that campaign, precisely to dis-incentivize such campaigns. I disagree. First because our primary obligation is to do what is technically best for the Internet community as a whole (even if that happens, probably by accident, to be aligned with what the campaigners want), and second because that kind of policy might actually encourage "gaming" of the IETF. My suggestion is to have a page on the IETF page called "how to influence IETF deliberations" which explains a few things, e.g. (a) the meaning of Experimental, Informational, Proposed Standard, etc.; (b) how the process works and who makes the deliberations at what stages; (c) that it's important to read the documents (and perhaps the references and/or supporting material like IPR statements) in order to understand just what decision is under consideration, and it's often important to read the mailing list traffic in order to understand what alternatives were rejected, and why; and (d) why a single well-reasoned and supported argument will quite naturally be given far more consideration than a thousand messages parroting a less-well-reasoned argument. Sort of like a Tao of IETF for non-participants. Keith _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf