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

[Adam Roach <[e-mail]>]

On 4/22/21 17:27, Keith Moore wrote:
> 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. 


That's the same argument on a smaller scale: I asserted that we needed 
(and then benefited from) a smaller haystack for the needles of 
interest, and you're saying that the new, much smaller haystack may 
still be too large for effective needle finding.

And it's a reasonable argument. I agree with the implication that 
last-call@ was merely an improvement and not perfection, and something 
like what you imply -- even finer grained breakdown than ietf@ and 
last-call@ -- *might* be even *more* of an improvement.

/a