--On Thursday, December 18, 2014 10:26 -0600 Nico Williams
<nico@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Is this bothering anyone else? Can something be done about
>> it?
>
> "meh"
>
> Once you're used to the noisiness... (And there's so much
> noise that you have to be.) Someone will now come out of the
> woodwork to condemn doing our business over e-mail (perhaps
> they'll propose web forums)... I don't see how we could keep
> track of so many things with any other technology, so I'll
> take all this extra noise, because with it comes all the value
> of doing business over e-mail.
Nico,
(after this, I'm not going to make things worse by responding
more today.)
While I agree with what you say and have many reasons to prefer
working by email, I have a different issue wrt "taking the
noise". Occasional appearances aside, I'm not a professional
standardizer. I have zero support for participation in IETF
work (and haven't had any for years). The more busy I get, the
more I need to put limits on time I spend on IETF things. From
my point of view, the more efficiently I can apply that time to
things that count, the more efficiently work the IETF seems to
think I should do gets done. The more noise I have to spend
time dealing with; the more the "real" IETF work is delayed.
So, from my point of view, if the IETF is going to call on me to
review documents, follow discussions, contribute text in various
areas, etc., the more it becomes part of the IETF's
responsibility to do things in a way that make me (and everyone
else in even vaguely similar situations) as efficient as
possible.
Yes, many of us could invest more time on filters. And, yes,
better provisions for duplicate message detection would probably
help with that. However, for those with limited time, that
involves some economy of scale issues and the same tradeoff
suggested above. Less painfully, I could filter out
substantially all the noise associated with a WG I'm trying to
keep an eye on but in which I'm not actively participating by
dropping off its mailing list, meaning that the only times I'd
see and comment on documents would be during Last Call (and have
applied that remedy), but people then (justifiably) complain
about late input and late surprises.
As an alternative, the IETF could explicitly conclude that
anyone who doesn't have a lot of time to spend should either get
out of here or focus narrowly on a single WG or document and
ignore the rest and the system. I think that would be very
bad, but I'm sure there are folks out there who would disagree.
best,
john