Re: draft discussion lists

["Fred Baker (fred)" <[e-mail]>]

On Sep 2, 2014, at 3:58 AM, Michael StJohns <[e-mail]> wrote:

> We seem to be getting  (or I seem to be noticing) a lot more drafts that aren't associated with a specific working group, or are pre-WG adoption. I'm finding myself at a loss for where to go on some of these to "discuss" that isn't off-topic for whatever list I might be directed to.  
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> How about 
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> 1) automatically creating a "discuss" list for each draft as it's published (separate from the send-to-authors address)
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> 2) providing a link to enroll in such list as part of the draft announcement and on the tracker page.
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> 3) providing tools for owners of the other lists (e.g. the working group list) to "adopt" the draft discuss email address either when the draft is adopted as a WG item, or if the wg deems the draft to be on-topic or better discussed by a wider audience.  If adopted, retain the email tagging of the email as a discussion on a particular draft.  Adoption should merge the subscription lists for the purpose of posting to the list.
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> 4) providing area-wide mailing lists (e.g. [e-mail], [e-mail]) etc for discussions less focused than appropriate for a WG but more focused than the IETF mailing list.  These should be different than the lists for the area advisory groups such as SAAG.   Have closed/ended WG emails default/merge to that mailing list if there isn't a reason to retain a separate list.
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> Part of the above is a desire to segment the conversations a bit more than we're currently doing so as to reduce the noise level.  Part of it is to provide tools (e.g. markings that identify something that's specifically a draft discussion from that of being a WG discussion) for filtering on receipt.
> 
> Later, Mike

We actually do have several area-wide lists, such as appsarea@ and rtgwg@.

As of today, I see 1879 internet drafts. Of those, 1428 are named for working groups.

The place I primarily see not-wg-names is irtf drafts (draft-irtf-nmrg-an-gap-analysis), IAB drafts (draft-iab-doi), drafts from old working groups or non-wg lists (draft-tsou-behave-natx4-log-reduction), drafts whose authors haven’t decided what working group they target (draft-welzl-ecn-benefits, which could be in aqm or tsvwg) or are building towards what someone hopes will be such a group, and some where someone fat-fingered the name of a working group. There are at least some where someone is simply bringing up a topic (draft-wierenga-ietf-eduroam or draft-secretaries-good-practices). 

When I see a draft that is named draft-*-v6ops-*-00.txt, I have a bot that sends a note to v6ops@ to encourage folks to read and discuss it. I could imagine a bot at IETF central that did the same thing - when a -00 draft is posted and one of the “words” in its name corresponds to the name of a mailing list, the list is copied on the announcement. What folks do with it is up to them, of course; in our case, if the working group doesn’t say anything or uniformly pans it, the chairs assume it’s not interesting, and if folks say “hey, there’s something interesting here”, OK, it’s interesting. One way that *could* work would be that the upload tool prepopulates some field with the name of a mailing list, and if it doesn’t come up with one, forces the author to identify one or more mailing lists s/he would like notified. I know of at least some folks that file a draft and feel disappointed that nobody commented on it, but didn’t know to take that step. OK, this would make sure the step got taken.