Re: [Internetgovtech] Transition to the web

Dan York <york@isoc.org> Thu, 10 July 2014 20:39 UTC

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From: Dan York <york@isoc.org>
To: John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com>
Thread-Topic: [Internetgovtech] Transition to the web
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Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 20:39:48 +0000
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Cc: Lucy Lynch <llynch@civil-tongue.net>, "<internetgovtech@iab.org>" <internetgovtech@iab.org>
Subject: Re: [Internetgovtech] Transition to the web
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John,

Good summary of the relevant points.  Thank you.  I do have one more philosophical comment... 

On Jul 10, 2014, at 1:14 PM, John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com>
 wrote:

> First, on which I agree with you, is the inherent difference
> between mailing lists and web-based forums, even when the latter
> are supplemented by notifications of when things change.  Part
> of it is a matter of convenience, part is that the difference
> biases the profiles of the participants.    
<snip>

> But not all of the community, even the IETT community, agrees
> with us.  If you were to go back and review the IETF threads
> about DMARC a while back, you would definitely see signs of an
> attitude that can, I think, be summarized as "mailing lists are
> an outdated way of communication and, if anti-spam measures make
> mailing lists less effective or less usable, that is a cheap
> price to pay".   From that perspective, sticking with mailing
> lists may bias the discussion toward those of us who are
> clinging to obsolete technologies.

There is the opposite side of Lucy's comment about the operation of mailing lists (that she typed in alpine).  I completely understand and sympathize with her viewpoint.  I started online in the early 1980's and for many, many years primarily read my email in pine with a whole set of procmail recipes helping keep me sane with a zillion different email lists.  I know there are MANY people within the IETF who still do that - I see it at meetings.  But, that ended for me a number of years back when I really got tired of running my own servers and switched to using webmail-based services and desktop clients. I also was doing more with files and graphics where the drag-and-drop world of the GUI mail clients worked a whole lot better for me.  Even still, I am a big supporter of mailing lists and prefer them in many cases, not the least of which is that I can pretty much read email from wherever I am whenever I want.

But...  there's a whole generation now that has grown up on the Internet *without* experiencing the power of (al)pine and procmail.  People use their ISP's webmail or Gmail or Hotmail or AOL or whatever... and for them the experience of email is typically a pretty poor one without much in the way of sorting, threading and filtering.  Instead of email they like the web-based discussion forums of Facebook or whatever other social network or forum site you want to talk about.  They'd rather have a lengthy discussion in Hacker News, Reddit or Slashdot with the easy capability to see threaded replies, to upvote/downvote, to reply to specific responses, to block people, to choose to get notifications - or NOT - for specific threads, to share links to specific parts of conversations with others.  A few of the email lists I used to be on are quiet now while vigorous discussions are happening in Facebook groups or Google+ communities.

They don't want email.   To them email is the communication medium of last resort when every other option has failed.

And I think some would dispute Lucy's characterization of email as "inclusion by default" because they would point out that in many web forums you can choose how you want to be notified of new articles and have much finer control of what you get versus having everything thrown in your inbox. And they might say that a web forum could be *more* inclusive because anyone can reach it with a web browser and don't need a mail account.

And yes... we could do what we do best as engineers and go down a really deep technical rathole about my last sentence...  and everyone could pile on in telling me how wrong I am and why email is so much better, etc., etc.

But that's not the point.  

The point is that for discussions to be truly "inclusive" of the wider Internet community we do need to find ways to involve people of both polarities - those who want to only read email in pine (and despise web forums) and those who want to only communicate in the web forums of Facebook or Reddit (and despise email).

I don't have the magic answer.

Maybe there isn't one.

If this was an IETF discussion we were talking about we could make it pretty simple because mailing lists are based on the open standards of SMTP and most web forums are their own proprietary walled gardens.  But it's ICANN trying to have the discussion and they are not a standards organization where these kind of things may matter as much.  

Somewhere in there is a balance between the polarities that needs to be made.

Dan