At 08:21 10-02-2009, Noel Chiappa wrote:
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.
Most of the people who have been following this mailing list already
know that mass email campaigns do not work. I encourage the new
participants to this list to read Section 9.1 of the Tao (
http://www.ietf.org/tao.html ). Sending a flood of emails may even
be counterproductive to your objective as it annoys regular
participants and drowns comments from people who share your
views. If you are going to push the same opinion ( we don't like X
because it will bring down the Internet ), it doesn't really matter
whether you are ten or a hundred saying that as consensus is not a
tally of votes.
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 don't think that a formal policy is needed. I can see ways to use
the count against the position in my favor. :-) Although I am not
happy about the letter-writing campaign and being forcefully
subscribed to some random mailing list, I'll view it as the price to
pay for being able to post to this mailing list. This doesn't mean
that I will put up with such behavior forever. I fortunately have
the choice to discard such messages automatically and I will do so.
Regards,
-sm
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