Re: New Version Notification for draft-nottingham-discussion-recharter-00.txt

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 8/17/20 6:23 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> 3. Moving contentious issues to dedicated open lists does not suppress debate.

I disagree somewhat, at least for issues that impinge on multiple areas 
of interest.  Every new list that a participant has to subscribe to in 
order to participate, is another impediment to broad participation.

I readily agree that the vast majority of IETF participants don't want 
to be bothered with administrative, policy, and process issues (and 
shouldn't need to be bothered by such things) - /unless/ they perhaps 
threaten fundamental or significant changes to how IETF works.   The 
question in my mind is: How to identify those issues, make the broader 
population aware of them, and make it easy to participate should they 
choose to do so (without bothering them if they don't)?

The low subscriber count to gendispatch is an indication that 
gendispatch isn't a great place to initially discuss, or dispatch, 
potentially controversial topics of widespread interest - precisely 
because its use in such instances would hide potentially controversial 
discussions from broad scrutiny.   And by the time a WG gets chartered, 
it's generally too late to fix its scope.

Sure, WG charters under consideration are posted to ietf-announce, but 
what percentage of participants really has time to read everything that 
gets posted to ietf-announce?  IMO that's another barrier to effective 
participation.

IMO the problem is _mostly_ a tools problem.   It seems like we could do 
a lot better at making it easy for participants to be aware of what's 
going on, without having to slog through enormous numbers of email 
messages.

Keith