Hi,
I'm going to half bake an idea here on how to get people more involved.
There are on-line gaming communities on the Internet that are loosely assembled
on a game site, there are usually no memberships, and people group together to
form klans and arrange games against other klans or teams. Tough guys (or
increasingly nowadays gals), have high frags rates, or high scores or whatever,
and are thus more likely to be "invited" to klans and get-togethers. These high
scores don't come easy though, but require vast amounts of play time on-line,
so an occasional visitor will not likely get into the "inner circles".
Now, I think such an online gaming community is a pretty good approximation of
the IETF. The only thing we don't have is a scoring system.
So how about creating one for the IETF? A participant could get points from
reviewing documents, taking part in mailing list discussions, attending
meetings, writing drafts etc. The chairs could keep a list of the high scorers
and publish it for all to see. We could document this in a BCP, so that all new
attendees would immediately know that getting into the inner circles requires
vast amounts of play time on-line, instead of say being extra friendly towards
a chair or AD.
I think this sort of thing would accomplish the incentive aspect Eric Rescorla
was after at the mike last night, and also make the mechanism by which people
move up in the hierarchy of the IETF explicit and public (also mentioned at the
mike last night).
Cheers,
Aki