To ASRG Group Members,
We need volunteers urgently and they have not been forthcoming. Do you
want the ASRG to just wither away until the IRTF shuts it down? Are you
happy seeing spammers laugh all the way to the bank? Do you want to be
there when our children will turn to us in the future and ask: "Mommy
and Daddy, where were you when spam killed email on the Internet?" Where
are all of the group members? We have over 600 subscribers with only a
small amount participating, where are the others?!?!?!
The purpose of the ASRG is to find solutions to spam. The group has been
active for about six months since March 2003. In this duration of time
the most useful anti-spam tool produced by the group has been our
mailing list archive containing more messages than most IETF/IRTF groups
produce in their entire lifetimes (6,200 to date). While talking on the
mailing list in some way leads to that goal and the archive does touch
on every aspect of spam, results are what counts not the chatter. RFC
2014 states that "the measure of success is the quality and impact of
the research results."
In the last few weeks the chatter on the list has definitely been
reduced, some form of organizational structure is being setup for some
area, and posting guidelines are more or less being followed, causing
the mailing list to be more readable than before. More is needed - we
need volunteers, people who are willing to give of their time to get
down, get dirty and produce results. Volunteers and RGs/WGs are like
water and trees - without volunteers the RGs/WGs wither and die.
It is very sad to see that the two foundational documents for the group,
the requirements document and the technical considerations document, got
three and one response respectively. The spam bibliography guidelines
had zero response. This is considering that the mailing list has over
600 subscribers ((plus uncounted numbers who read the web and gmane
archives) but at any given time at most only 30 are active! That
constitutes less than 10% of the entire membership! What about the other
90%?!?!?!?
We need to move the group forward. While jumping straight to proposals
may seem very good to many, we cannot do that. We seek to understand and
analyze the spam problem, before we can hope to objectively evaluate
proposals. That is why we need to focus on the foundation of the group
which includes inventory of problems, requirements, evaluation model,
consent framework, technical considerations document, analysis,
bibliography, survey of solutions, identification of standardization
requirements, etc. All of these things either do not have volunteers or
are not getting very little feedback from the group members. Without a
solid foundation for the group we cannot hope to be able to evaluate any
proposals objectively and consider its impact on the Internet.
There are many things that can be done but without volunteers we cannot
do them. These include:
o Volunteering to lead or participate an area
o Editing and reviewing documents
o Simply participating in the list discussions on foundational documents
o Proposing suggestions to improve the group
o Volunteering to write up or do something
At this point we want to focus on working toward the next drafts of the
requirements document, technical considerations document and inventory
of problems, as well as other foundational documents. Please step up and
help! We need help with almost every single item and area, we also need
suggestions and comments for improvement. We need YOU to make the
anti-spam work possible and to bring a solution to reality.
Sincerely,
Yakov Shafranovich
Co-Chair, ASRG
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