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

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

--On Sunday, 26 September, 2021 10:13 +0200 Eliot Lear
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> "All problems in computer science can be solved by another
> level of indirection"
> 
> — Butler Lampson
> 
> "All problems can be solved with an additional mailing
> list." 
> 
> — The IESG
> 
> Below
> 
>> I have two different sources of mixed feelings about this.
>> 
>> First, If we create an "important" list, will more people
>> unsubscribe from the "announce" list? Is that the desired
>> effect? If we do this experiment, will we monitor the
>> "announce" list?
> 
> I vaguely recall -announce being created for important
> announcements. And now it seems that we have cluttered that
> list. A better approach would be to unclutter it.

Indeed.

Let me suggest one small example:  When a WG decides to schedule
an interim meeting, that announcement should go to the WG list
and _maybe_ to an Area-wide list for the relevant area, not to
IETF-announce.  Posting a calendar of upcoming meetings to
IETF-announce every month or so would seem reasonable even
though most of us know where to find that.

I also hope that most of us have at least half-competent MUAs
with either decent filtering capabilities, have gotten really
good at finding and hitting the "delete" key, or both.  Being
more careful about the design of subject lines for automated
announcements would help a lot with clutter management.  For
example, organizing subject lines something like

   Virtual meeting: <Area> <WG> <date and time info>

would make it _much_ easier to filter things according to
personal needs and inclinations than the current setup.  We
could also get better at dealing with the "only interested in
one class of things" issue that Bron identified by thinking
enough about metadata and categories enough that he (and I) are
put at least risk of missing something that is really important
to us because, for example, a decision was made many years ago
that work related to the DNS was an Internet Area issue rather
than an applications one and that work on email encryption was
about Security and not email: in both cases much of it quite
reasonably is, but some things aren't.  

So, while some tuning of the mailing lists may be appropriate,
let's put more energy, as Eliot suggests, into reducing clutter
rather than spreading it around.  And let's try to improve
information accessibility and the ability of people to
selectively get the information they need and manage it while we
are doing that.

Finally, I don't share Ned's pessimism (at least one most days)
and continue to believe that we should not make it extra-easy
for people to narrowly focus on one specific topic or set of
documents and ignore everything else.

best,
   john