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

[Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>]

Hi Kyle,

> I don't have the long history of IETF involvement that you do, but knowing many of the old-timers I am not at all surprised.


Since I’ve been part of the party since 1988, I think it’s time for a change.  But I would rather it not be hasty (I feel one of Tolkien’s Ents saying that).

Opportunity for all to express a point of view is important in order to produce the best work, but the IETF list has the added challenge of being quite general and cross-cutting in nature, and that means that things tend to meander into the weeds.

Simply shutting down the IETF list, however, leaves us less of a community.  We need to figure out how to evolve a plenary function, and we should be thinking about all the modalities and tooling available to us.

Rather than view this as a complete negative, I suggest that we take this as a challenge to find an industry-leading way to improve overall decision making and discourse in an environment where rough consensus matters, without us getting too… rough.

Let’s not just allow for new possibilities here; let’s seek them.

Eliot