Re: Old directions in social media.

[Wes Hardaker <[e-mail]>]

Keith Moore <[e-mail]> writes:

> On 1/5/21 7:05 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
>     I think the same could be said about decisions that are made on
>     obscure mailing lists -- many developers refuse to subscribe to
>     them now because of their awful usability problems.

> And Keith wrote:
> Also not sure which "awful usability problems" you're referring to,
> because some people seem to think that even using email at all ([...])
> are impositions.??

We (anyone that's participated in the IETF for a long or potentially
short time) have learned how to use email well.  But it is a skill, and
it's a skill that a lot of the younger generations really don't want to
learn.  It's not easy to edit text, quote people properly, not top-post,
not mess up fonts and markups, not realize that some readers don't
support fonts and markups, quote text in a readable way, etc.  Editing
straight ASCII or UTF-8 is a skill that is absolutely possible for "us"
today because we've both developed it and use editors that help us.

But the younger generations are writing reports and documents only using
online collaborative editing, don't use email at all, and find they're
very productive under github issue trackers and slack etc.  I mentor a
fairly large high school software team.  They use no email (sticking to
slack and github) and have zero desire to start.  Because it's a skill
they don't have, they don't feel they need and thus its a skill they
actively don't want.  I've given them many mini-lectures that when they
get to a work place they'll likely be forced to use email.  But, even
many work environments are holding a multitude of their discussions over
some channel-based discussion platform instead.

FWIW, I hate issue trackers because of their lack of threaded
conversations (though almost no MUAs support that now too), because it's
impossible to know where to start reading again when I've missed a day,
etc.  I do love the attached labeling, assignments, tagging and status
metadata, but the discussion forum doesn't work for me.  But I
absolutely recognize that many others in the world don't have *my*
issues with it.

We can absolutely set the minimum entrance requirements to be able to
participate in the IETF, either globally or per-wg.  But if its not
inclusive as widely as possible we lose opinions from talented subject
matter experts.  Given the aging population of the core IETF
participants, we're headed for a cliff if we don't find a common middle
ground that works for the largest intersection of the participants that
we can attract.  That doesn't mean giving up, but it does mean finding a
reasonable consensus.  Likely rough.

-- 
Wes Hardaker
USC/ISI