Re: IETF chair's blog

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On Feb 25, 2013, at 17:33, [e-mail] wrote:

> A tools-login required for posting comments?

In a ~ 20-year IETFer, it evokes a bit of a smirk to see the IETF now starting to define its social media strategy...

The answer to the question depends on whether you want to engage IETFers only or a larger public.

If it is IETFers only, this mailing list is fine.
(The tools login is an even narrower group.)

A blog can be useful for addressing a larger public.  
It's going to be far cry from Obama's tweets, but it's better than posting to an internal mailing list.

If this is supposed to be two-way communication and you want to get input from the larger public, be prepared for some loss of control.

Spammers aren't really the problem these days; there is pretty good software to minimize their impact.

People who genuinely want to engage you but are adding more noise than signal are the real problem.

We have enough experience with people who live in a completely different reality than most of us do.  Imagine running an appeals process through this blog.
(There are also people within the IETF that are well-respected for their technical input but still live in a slightly different reality from the rest of the world; their statements can become off-message for you quickly.)
So there needs to be a policy when comments are hidden or even deleted (no, that's not censorship), and this policy may need to be made known.  It will be debated.
There also need to be people who maintain response times within some reasonable latency while you are out skiing -- a response, maybe not the final solution.

Reaching out from an organization into social media tends to become a pretty big operation quickly, if it is done in a professional way.
But it may be worth it.
At least you don't have the SEC coming after you if you happen to make the wrong kind of statement.
Doing this with an appropriately personal touch may be the natural approach for us, but most of the work items do remain.

Grüße, Carsten