Re: [irsg] Proposal: an "important-news" IETF announcement list

[Lars Eggert <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

thanks for the feedback!

On 2021-9-25, at 19:03, Bob Hinden <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Like what Brian and other have said, 4.6 emails per workday doesn’t seem like a burden to me.  BTW, assuming “workday” means Monday-Friday, it’s only 3.3 emails per day over a year.

Correct. While that amount of email is OK to some, it seems to not be OK for others. And participants in the latter group seem to unsubscribe rather investing the time to tweak their filters, which is their choice.

>> 1.  Announcements sent manually by the IETF Chair, the IAB Chair, the
>>   IRTF Chair, the Chair of the LLC Board, the IETF Executive Director,
>>   the NomCom Chair, and the IETF Secretariat
>> 2.  Announcements of new and updated WG charters
>> 3.  WG closure announcements
>> 4.  Announcements of new non-WG mailing lists
>> 5.  Announcements of new RFCs
>> 6.  IESG and LLC telechat announcements
>> 7.  Announcements of document actions
>> 8.  Announcements of IESG conflict-review results
>> 9.  Last call announcements for I-Ds
>> 10. Interim WG meeting announcements
> 
> Please break this down further.   That is, how many emails of each type per year.  It’s hard to evaluate this proposal without knowing that.

OK, this is based on the monthly ietf-announce mbox files, starting with 2020-10.mail, so the counts are slightly different than in the original email. I did this manually with tags in mutt, so take this with a grain of salt:

1196 total messages

1.  Announcements sent manually
	34	by the IETF Chair/ED
	39	the IAB Chair
	0	the IRTF Chair
	0 	the Chair of the LLC Board
	136	the IETF Executive Director
	20	the NomCom Chair
	13	the IETF Tools support
	3	IANA
	1	ISOC
	38	and the IETF Secretariat
2.  Announcements of new and updated WG charters
	44
3.  WG closure announcements
	(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 ietf-announce list currently has 3095 subscribers, which is a
>> fraction of the overall IETF community. Only 961 of these subscribers
>> have Datatracker accounts; out of 13311 overall Datatracker account
>> holders.
> 
> This is disturbing.   How can one function in the IETF when you aren’t getting information about meetings, draft deadlines, new working groups, BOFs, etc.?
> 
> How many of these data tracker accounts are active?    I wouldn’t be surprised that a large portion of them haven’t been used for a while, or sent email, etc.

I don't have that data, but I will ask. See my response to Brian on that we maybe want to come to agreement on a definition of an "active participant", for these and other reasons.

>> When asking IETF participants about why they are not
>> subscribed, the volume of email on the list
>> - especially automatically-generated Datatracker email - is the most often
>> mentioned reason.
> 
> How many "automatically-generated Datatracker email” are there?  Are all except for 1. in the numbered lists data tracker generated?

Everything in my list above except those under (1) are automatically-generated. Roughly 1000.


Thanks,
Lars