Re: [Gendispatch] Let's restore and evolve our plenary function (Re: Ending [e-mail])

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 4/4/21 7:37 AM, Livingood, Jason wrote:

>> Let’s not just allow for new possibilities here; let’s seek them.
> I like the idea of seeking new solutions, speaking personally. I also think we unduly constrain our thinking when regularly assuming that collaboration & discussion requires email - time to perhaps move some types of interactions to new technical forms.

As far as I can tell, Dave Crocker and Jon Postel and their colleagues 
in the late 1980s had a much better handle on effective interpersonal 
communications than the developers of any of the other excuses for 
collaborative media that I've experienced to date.

At the same time, clearly email doesn't need to be stuck in the late 
1990s.   There's room for some improvement in email that takes advantage 
of better connectivity (in most but not all parts of the world), broader 
availability of server resources, perhaps ease of management, and so forth.

A lot of the effectiveness of an email-based approach depends on what 
user agents people use, which in turn influence their email reading 
habits.   For instance, I have no problem ignoring messages from threads 
that I don't find interesting, whereas other people seem to experience 
those messages as a huge burden.   I expect that the difference is 
related to the tools we are each using.   But there's a lot of inertia 
around the user agents and email systems that people use, and for 
multiple reasons it's hard for people to change tools.

I fully expect that whatever new ideas IETF came up with would 
eventually need a web interface, so that users would have multiple 
choices for how to access that system.

Keith