Re: Proposal: an "important-news" IETF announcement list

[tom petch <[e-mail]>]

On 29/09/2021 13:11, Lars Eggert wrote:
>
> On 2021-9-27, at 18:36, Eliot Lear <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> In an admirable effort to be transparent, we have inundated this list in particular with data.  We now need to take the time to reduce that data  to usable information.  Please take another swing.
>
> the IESG certainly could. But I'm also pretty convinced that whatever proposal we came up with would get improved by the community pretty immediately.
>
> So maybe we could try the opposite, and see if the community has some consensus on what information they would like to retain on ietf-announce, under the assumption that that would then remain our lists for broad announcements.
>
> For reference, here's again the list of posting classes that currently go there, and the count of messages in each class in the last year:
>
> 1.  Announcements sent manually by <various roles> = 284
> 2.  Announcements of new and updated WG charters & WG closures = 44
> 3.  (included in above 44)
> 4.  Announcements of new non-WG mailing lists =	13
> 5.  Announcements of new RFCs =	275
> 6.  IESG and LLC telechat announcements = 39
> 7.  Announcements of document actions = 175
> 8.  Announcements of IESG conflict-review results = 14
> 9.  Last call announcements for I-Ds = 174 (+ 4 for other actions)
> 10. Interim WG meeting announcements = 256
>
> The "important-news" proposal would only retain those under (1) above. (We could have a conversation if some of those could also be moved elsewhere, but that's maybe a separate discussion.)

I believe that it is a mistake to entitle something important; that is 
subjective, depends on the sender and is likely not true for the 
recipient.  Perhaps significant, noteworthy, you may be interested to 
know, anything that leaves the reader with his judgement unimpugned.

As to what, then I was thinking that the Admin announcements are the 
most irrelevant, except when they tell me of an impending outage, or one 
that just happened, or a possible one due to a migration.  These are 
rare but I would class them as Critical.

After that, Last Call announcements. A key feature of the IETF is 
cross-area review IMHO and the Last Call announcements make that point. 
  They could be summarised, since a last call is two weeks or more then 
a weekly e-mail of Last Call announcements made in the last seven days 
would cut the frequency by a factor of three on the IETF list with 
individual e-mails still going out on a not-so-significant IETF list.

After the, announcements about the creation or potential creation or 
winding up of a Working Group.  Again, working in Working Groups is a 
key feature of the IETF so they matter more.

Tom Petch

> For any type of posting we'd remove, we could of course create a new list, so that the information was still shared. I understand that when we move to mailman3, we'll get a much better web-based subscription interface that will make managing subscriptions much more straightforward.
>
> Thanks,
> Lars
>