Jay, --On Wednesday, February 26, 2020 19:09 +1300 Jay Daley <jay@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > As I said to Brian, it would be useful for me to understand > why subscribing to rfp-announce - did I just need to make it > clearer that this is a zero sum change as far as email volume > goes? > > My concern btw is the lack of a clear principle that decides > what gets copied to ietf-announce and why (assuming you > don't mean everything that goes to rfp-announce). My answer may differ from Bob's and Brian's, but have an observation and possible reason that generalizes far beyond this change. There are at least two kinds of openness and transparency. One is to have information available to those who know where to find it and take the time to go looking for it. The other involving "pushing" the information and its availability with the expectation that people may stumble across information of interest, especially information about topics on with they are not only interested but expert but would not have thought to go looking for. The most important example of this applies to our standards process and one of the big advantages of f2f meetings over remote participation: if someone is at a f2f meeting and doesn't have a WG in which they are particularly involved in a given slot, they may find something in that slot about which they are mildly curious, wander in, and actually learn something and/or contribute. People participating from their own desks are much more likely to find something else to do. It may seem like a stretch to get from there to announcements about RFPs, but understanding what RFPs are out there and, more important, how you and the IETF Administration LLC are breaking things up into pieces may be more important to the community than we generally realize. It may be particularly important for the community to monitor the tendencies of all bureaucracies to divide work up into more pieces in ways that justify more contracts, contractors, and administration and therefore more staff and other resources. I am _not_ suggesting that we have that problem or that we would ever have it under your administration, but it is a long-term, known risk. Probably more important in the near term, an unexpected notice of an RFP might allow some member of the community with particular expertise, one who normally has no interest in RPFs, to speak up and say "hey, I know something about that and, while I have no interest in bidding, I think you are structuring it all wrong for the following reasons". It would be unfortunate to lose that type of expertise and opportunity for input even if it comes infrequently. It would also be unfortunate to lose the possibility of someone spotting a particular RFP topic for which they know someone with expertise who might not otherwise hear about an opportunity and alerting that person even though they, themselves, have no interest in ever bidding on an RFP. I worried about the same thing when we split the Last Call list out: as IETF's work gets more specialized, if someone comes to the IETF specifically to participate in a specific WG or two, they may not feel a need to subscribe to the Last Call list because notifications for Last Calls on that WG's work will be clear from the WG list and discussions. But, if they do not subscribe to the Last Call list, we lose out on whatever topics they might serendipitously be alerted to for which they have expertise -- in other WGs, in other areas, and in individual submissions. Those are really not arguments to avoid splitting the lists. Instead, they suggest that, if you are going to do such a thing, that you be aware of possible unintended side-effects and figure out a way to mitigate them or even improve things because of them. Would we benefit from a monthly summary report from you, one that summarizes or details outstanding RFPs, not just plenary reports? Do we need more explanatory material about why those who subscribe to the IETF-announce list might want to subscribe to the other lists too? Should subscribing to IETF-Announce automatically put one on the other lists on an opt-out basis rather than requiring people to find them one at a time and subscribe (that would protect people who only want to see the RFP list from being bothered by the irrelevant-to-them traffic on the IETF-Announce but would keep the information for subscribers to the latter constant)? As we continue to break things out (I definitely see a trend) should we think of IETF-Announce as a list of lists to which people can subscribe (or opt out) selectively if they so choose but whose default is "all announcements"? And so on. I don't know the answers to any of those questions, but would hope that you (and we) would think about them. best, john
