[Idr] Moderating "+1" messages

TL;DR: If you want to contribute to a working group consensus thread, please subscribe to the mailing list. Thanks.

Hi Everybody,

I've noticed a number of "+1" messages on the thread "Request to adopt draft-heitz-idr-large-community" from people who aren't subscribed to the IDR mailing list. (Such messages are held for moderator approval instead of being sent directly to the list.) I'm guessing that someone must have posted about this thread on another list, perhaps an operators' forum? In any case, let me remind you that in a call for working group adoption, it's the chairs' responsibility to judge, among other things, whether the working group is interested in taking the work on. Now, in the IETF we have quite a liberal definition of what it means to be part of a working group, but at a minimum working group members are generally expected to be subscribed to the mailing list. So, comments from people who are not subscribed to the list do not directly contribute to our ability to judge whether the working group, as such, is interested. For this reason, I'm not going to approve any more "+1" messages from people who aren't subscribed. Now, there are a number of things to keep in mind:

- Although such comments don't directly contribute to our ability to gauge working group consensus, they may still indirectly contribute to forming that consensus, since members of the working group should pay attention to what the users of the protocol need and want. Presumably these comments are coming from people who use the protocol and have legitimate needs and wants. We should take this into account.
- The IETF (famously, or maybe infamously) doesn't operate by voting, but by rough consensus. So it's legitimate, depending on the circumstances, for chairs to determine that consensus was not achieved even though there were lots of +1 "votes".
- Even from someone who is a list subscriber, a "+1" message is pretty low-content, so regardless of whether you are, or are not, a list subscriber it's helpful for you to state your reasoning and to be prepared to engage in further discussion.
- Anybody who wants to can become a list subscriber without further approval from me or anyone else, and I have no intention of changing that. All are welcome. You can use the web form at https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/idr or the usual mailman interface. Messages from list members are not moderated. 
- In general, we still will welcome (including providing moderator approval) contributions from people who don't choose to become list subscribers. The emphasis is on "contributions", that is to say, messages with non-trivial content. 
- People who for some reason wish to weigh in on this conversation without subscribing to the list, should consider introducing themselves, describing what their interest is in the subject, and then stating their position. For example, "hi, I am J. R. Operator, I work in the operations group at Bill's Bait, Sushi, and Wholesale Internet. Here at BBS&WI we have been suffering grievously from lack of #feature for several years and I believe that #draft is the most expedient way to correct this problem. Thanks."
- Finally, my comments above notwithstanding I'd like to say the vast majority of contributions to the thread have been high-content and productive, thank you very much to those who have contributed so far. Carry on!

Presumably the people who most need to see this message won't, because by definition they aren't subscribed to the list. Please forward as necessary. I will also provide a pointer to this info with any bounce messages (but people often filter bounce messages so that's not a very reliable channel unfortunately).

Thanks!

--John