Re: how to contact the IETF

[SM <[e-mail]>]

At 08:21 10-02-2009, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>Because if organizing an email campaign works for the FSF, next thing you
>know, BigCorp X will be telling everyone who works for it 'we want standard Q
>approved, please send email to the IETF list about that'. If we allow
>ourselves to be influenced by a mass email campaign, all we are doing is
>virtually guaranteeing that we will get more.  So I think we have an active
>interest is responding _negatively_ to such campaigns.

Most of the people who have been following this mailing list already 
know that mass email campaigns do not work.  I encourage the new 
participants to this list to read Section 9.1 of the Tao ( 
http://www.ietf.org/tao.html ).  Sending a flood of emails may even 
be counterproductive to your objective as it annoys regular 
participants and drowns comments from people who share your 
views.  If you are going to push the same opinion ( we don't like X 
because it will bring down the Internet ), it doesn't really matter 
whether you are ten or a hundred saying that as consensus is not a 
tally of votes.

>Rather than adopt indirect measures (such as requiring people to be registered
>users of a list), I would go straight to the heart of the matter, and adopt a
>formal policy that a mass email campaign should count _against_ the position
>taken by that campaign, precisely to dis-incentivize such campaigns.

I don't think that a formal policy is needed.  I can see ways to use 
the count against the position in my favor. :-)  Although I am not 
happy about the letter-writing campaign and being forcefully 
subscribed to some random mailing list, I'll view it as the price to 
pay for being able to post to this mailing list.  This doesn't mean 
that I will put up with such behavior forever.  I fortunately have 
the choice to discard such messages automatically and I will do so.

Regards,
-sm