Re: [mpowr] Mailing List Management

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

--On Monday, 29 December, 2003 11:47 -0700 Alex Rousskov 
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> I suspect that once/if we have easier banning rules, more
> people will feel compelled to circumvent them. In fact, even
> with the existing rules, IETF participants have faked e-mail,
> subscribed to the list with more than one name, and done other
> terrible things (as privately confirmed by a senior IETFer who
> was working on formalizing the banning process).
>
> IMO, this means that "easy" rules should be nearly perfect or
> should not be.

Alex, I can't imagine why you think this follows.   In many 
organizations, and in the IETF in other areas than mailing list 
management, it is the hard/rigid rules that inspire people to 
see if they can game them.   It is the very specific rules that 
encourage people to do slightly outrageous things, safe in the 
knowledge that they can claim unfairness if those things violate 
the spirit, but not the letter, of the rules.

By contrast, whatever the other merits of the idea, "the WG 
chair can kick someone off a list, at least for a while, for 
being --in that person's opinion-- disruptive or generally 
irritating" isn't going to encourage rule-circumvention as an 
end in itself, if only because that would certainly be 
"generally irritating".

Now, if you had said "if we start kicking people off lists 
regularly and in large quantities, that would encourage 
circumvention", I'd probably agree... but suggest that would 
demonstrate that we have other problems which it would be good 
to get on the table.

The bottom line, it seems to me, is that we need to function, as 
Dave Crocker has been pointing out (I hope I've correctly 
understood him), as a collaborative community.  No amount of 
rule-making is going to cause either a sense of collaboration or 
a sense of community to happen.  If we can't keep (or recover) 
that sense, then we need a rather different set of rules and 
structures, to the point that debates about mailing list 
participation is a waste of time.  Within such a community, it 
seems quite rational to me to tell WG Chairs that they have lead 
responsibility for WG progress.  If something or someone is 
interfering with that progress --including disruptions on 
mailing lists-- then they should be encouraged to stop it and, 
if necessary, pushed out of the way.  Should the AD be fully 
informed about such an action?  Of course.  Should it be 
appealable?  Even more obviously.  But the right way to deal 
with problems of these sorts _within a community_ is to catch 
them earlier and push back (which, IMO, should include involving 
the whole WG in a "shunning" process when that seems useful), 
not to try to solve them by creating ever-more-rigid and complex 
procedures.

Fewer formal procedures, more exercise of good sense, more 
unambiguous negative reinforcement for failure to exercise good 
sense....

     john


_______________________________________________
mpowr mailing list
[e-mail]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/mpowr