Noel Chiappa wrote:
> From: Andrew Sullivan <ajs(_at_)shinkuro(_dot_)com>
> This means that those "driving by" have to be tolerated, I think.
Ah, no.
Because if organizing an email campaign works for the FSF, next thing you
know, BigCorp X will be telling everyone who works for it 'we want standard Q
approved, please send email to the IETF list about that'. If we allow
ourselves to be influenced by a mass email campaign, all we are doing is
virtually guaranteeing that we will get more. So I think we have an active
interest is responding _negatively_ to such campaigns.
I don't think we have to do anything special to respond negatively to
such campaigns. Basically we're all dealing with information overload
anyway, which provides plenty of incentive to prune irrelevant sources.
The more messages that we receive from people who either appear to be
parroting, or don't seem to have actually read the relevant documents
enough to understand the issues, the more difficult it will be for
anyone who has to gauge consensus or technical soundness to find the
rare new and valid point that might be made by some contributor to that
campaign.
Rather than adopt indirect measures (such as requiring people to be registered
users of a list), I would go straight to the heart of the matter, and adopt a
formal policy that a mass email campaign should count _against_ the position
taken by that campaign, precisely to dis-incentivize such campaigns.
I disagree. First because our primary obligation is to do what is
technically best for the Internet community as a whole (even if that
happens, probably by accident, to be aligned with what the campaigners
want), and second because that kind of policy might actually encourage
"gaming" of the IETF.
My suggestion is to have a page on the IETF page called "how to
influence IETF deliberations" which explains a few things, e.g.
(a) the meaning of Experimental, Informational, Proposed Standard, etc.;
(b) how the process works and who makes the deliberations at what
stages; (c) that it's important to read the documents (and perhaps the
references and/or supporting material like IPR statements) in order to
understand just what decision is under consideration, and it's often
important to read the mailing list traffic in order to understand what
alternatives were rejected, and why; and (d) why a single well-reasoned
and supported argument will quite naturally be given far more
consideration than a thousand messages parroting a less-well-reasoned
argument. Sort of like a Tao of IETF for non-participants.
Keith
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf