Re: Stray thoughts on ' Update of IESG statement "Last Call Guidance to the Community"'

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 4/22/21 4:59 PM, Adam Roach wrote:

> On 4/22/21 15:40, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> Tom,
>>
>>> Last, comments from organised review teams should be sent to the last
>>> call list as opposed to being made available to the community.
>> The last call list *is* available to the community, so this is just
>> being more specific about what "available to the community" means.
>> Is that a problem?
>
>
> More pointedly -- it lets folks see discussions of IETF work product 
> without them getting lost among (checks notes) 150 messages about a 
> New York Times article, 132 posts about QUIC and DNSSEC, and 234 
> messages about inclusiveness.
>
> I'm not necessarily saying these topics aren't worth discussing; but 
> it's important to get broad consensus on the documents we publish as 
> RFCs, and we can't afford to lose those conversations under the crush 
> of high-volume topics. The risk of documents in last call getting lost 
> in the noise is far more of a barrier to being "available to the 
> community" than the use of a dedicated mailing list.

One can credibly make the opposite argument also: that it's hard to find 
the time/patience to scan all of the Last Call discussions that happen, 
just so you can be "in the loop" for the relatively rare Last Call 
discussions that seem important to you.

More generally: one person's "noise" that one can get "lost in" is, to 
another person, a topic of vital importance to the organization.   And 
there's a risk of putting all discussions in narrow silos, which is 
reduced awareness on the part of participants of the breadth of the 
organization's activities and influences, and also (especially with 
gendispatch) reduced awareness of the changes people are trying to make 
to the organization itself.

I understand why people wanted last-call@ but I think it's more of a 
sideways step, maybe slightly backwards also, than a step forward.

What I'd really like to see is the ability to subscribe to Last Call 
discussions on a per-wg, per-topic, or per-area basis. Because I often 
identify particular WGs or discussions that will be interesting to me in 
some way, and would definitely like to review their drafts, but don't 
have enough time to read all of their mailing list traffic.   Of course 
I'm perfectly capable of writing code to filter the various lists and 
rearrange their output to better suit me.    But the way we present this 
information to participants by default does affect how our organization 
works, and not necessarily for the better.

Keith