Dear colleagues,
On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 11:13:10AM +0200, Yoav Nir wrote:
> The new site is focused not on the existing people active in the IETF. It’s focused on the general public. The place where work gets done these days is datatracker.
>
I have had a look at the beta site, and it seems to me that we have at
least three possible audiences:
1. People who wonder what an IETF is and how it might be useful
to them. That actually is an important function of a website, and
despite the arguments about how the IETF isn't about marketing
organization (and the xkcd observations about university websites)
we cannot ignore this function. To some extent, we are competing
with other ways of developing the Internet -- "living standards",
code as standard, multilateral standards bodies, &c -- and if we
think our way is good for some cases we do in fact need to market
that. I think the beta site is obviously better at that than our
current site, which appears to be designed with a MEMBERS ONLY
sign on the front. We are the hardest club to join given that we
don't have membership. I think the beta site is trying to make
that burden a little less, and I believe it is a good thing.
2. People who already are familiar with the IETF and are working
here. The beta site says it's supposed to be the "new front
door". I don't know about all of you, but in my own house I also
know how to enter by the other doors. Maybe we just need to use a
different entrance?
3. People whose connectivity makes the more graphically intense
and somewhat larger site less useful. I think it would be useful
to analyse the extent to which this is a real problem, and whether
the trade-off is adequate for the particular use case we have in
mind. After all, loading this (still not huge) web page is hardly
the most bandwidth-intensive thing a plausible IETF participant is
likely to do. Moreover, it's not clear whether the problem in
this case is slow backhaul links or slow local/last-mile links; if
it's the latter, more IXes (and CDNs) are likely good enough
mitigations. This seems like an issue that could use some
empirical data, but I am not sure how to get it. Perhaps the
participants of GAIA would hae some ideas.
I appreciate the effort to make these changes in public with lots of
consultation: I know how much harder it is to run a project this way,
but I think it's a good sign that the tools are as usual being
developed this way.
Best regards,
A
--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx