Fundamental changes in IETF discussions? (was: Re: Messages from the ietf list for the week ending Sun Dec 27 06:00:02 2020)

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

John,

I think there is something interesting to be learned from the
last couple of weeks of these postings.   My recollection is
that, when Thomas started his version of the summaries, the main
IETF list was an active forum for discussions of issues of
importance to the IETF and the Internet.  One could often get a
sense of important issues being considered by the IETF just by
reading that list, attending plenaries, and, before we dropped
them, overview reports from each Area at the plenaries or in
Proceedings.  Yes, there was noise on it too, but the list was
active and those more substantive discussions were going on.  A
decade ago, I could not have imagined a week in which there were
only three postings (which occurred last week) or one in which
there were 15 postings, each from a different person (this week).

Perhaps that is a good sign, i.e., that the list traffic is not
dominated by a few people posting rants and counter-rants in
quick succession.  But that behavior still occurs on IETF lists
I'm watching (and, subjectively, I think it has gotten worse
overall in recent years), so perhaps we have just shifted it
elsewhere.  This is, I think obviously, not just about the
separation of Last Call discussions although those sometimes
lead to more general ones that now do not show up anywhere else,
but to larger trends of pushing topics that might be of general
interest into silos for which one has to make a specific
commitment to sign up for a list and follow.

However, I wonder if we are not losing something by what appears
to me to be a growing trend to separate discussion topics off
into topic-specific lists and to do so fairly early in the life
cycle of topics and clusters of discussions.   I'm going to skip
my usual long speculation and analysis and I understand that the
tradeoffs are complicated, but I wonder if we, or at least the
IESG (probably after its March composition is known) should be
thinking about these issues as tradeoffs and what can be done to
mitigate the liabilities.

   john


--On Sunday, December 27, 2020 10:59 +0000 John Levine
<[e-mail]> wrote:

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>   1 ( 6.7%) |  18109 (16.3%) | Stephan Wenger <[e-mail]>
>   1 ( 6.7%) |  14775 (13.3%) | tom petch
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