Subject: The IETF 66 Attendees Alias

From: "Alan Hawrylyshen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2006 19:15:00 -0400

Folks;

I understand the utility and need for the administrative staff to have
a mailing alias for all registered delegates for the 66th IETF event.
However, in all the meetings I have attended - which is more than a
few, but less than most of you - I have never been deluged with such a
volume of non-critical announcements in my main inbox.

I hope that people will understand my strong desire and sympathize
with my point of view when I request that all general IETF messages be
posted uniquely to the IETF general list and that this address be
reserved only for the critical or emergency announcements by the
administrative staff. One step better would be for this address to be
moderated so we no longer receive various complaints about water
closets and wifi unless we seek them out on the IETF discussion lists.
:-)

Perhaps if there is a strong desire to have a 'hallway or watercooler
style' list for discussions pertaining uniquely to IETF 66 attendees,
we could create a NEW mailing list that is OPT-IN called
66attendees-chat (or similar) at ietf.org. I'd even volunteer to set
one up (at a different domain of course) for the duration of IETF 66.

My sincere apologies if I have misunderstood the purpose of the
66attendees address but my BlackBerry is going crazy with things that
I would not normally choose to have in my commercial, corporate email
box.

Respectfully,

Alan Hawrylyshen

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: Ray Pelletier <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2006 22:52:42 -0400

Alan, et al.
Message received.
I agree.
Changes being made.
Experiment provided valuable information.
Sorry for the pain.
Ray
IAD

---

From: "Yaakov Stein" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 17:12:50 +0200

Ray, 

I sent a similar email in reply to the endless thread on Internet access
at the Delta.

Please only allow emails to the participants list from IETF personel
for important meeting-related information.

Y(J)S

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 06:03:49 -0400

> Experiment provided valuable information.

1. Having IETF administration try new things is considerably better than having
IETF administration NOT try new things.

2. It wouldn't be experimenting if it were guaranteed to succeed.

3. At this stage, anything that gets done is really (at least) two experiments,
not one.  One is whatever is intended to be the experiment.  The other is
whether the process of making changes gets done better, over time...

4. Having a per-meeting special list has an obvious and reasonable basis.
However it makes each meeting's list a special case for IETF administration and
for attendees.  Possible variations to consider:

   a. Have the list name be permanent (such as "ietf-attendees") so that
recipients can have a filing filter that they create one time.

   b. Per Eric's suggestion, at registration time ask whether the registrant
wants to be added to the list.  Subscriptions are not removed after an ietf
meeting.  If someone wants to be removed, they use the usual unsubscription
techniques (which, of course, also encourages having the standardized
list-unsubscribe header.)

   c. Or, list membership is automatic with registration -- given the specific
nature of this list, making membership be involuntary isn't necessarily
unreasonable. If the registrant's email address is already subscribed, of course
they don't get a second subscription.  (List software is usually pretty good at
reporting already-subscribed membership.)

d/

---

From: Ken Raeburn <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:02:30 -0400

> recipients can have a filing filter that they create one time.

If the spam filtering is good, or its subscribers-only... otherwise,  
per-meeting names with a known, simple pattern (ietf$MEETINGNUM- 
attendees?) might be better, if a little harder to match in some  
filter software.

d. Automatic subscription to a moderated, low-traffic announcement  
list, and optional subscription to a "chat" list for discussions of  
cookies, WCs, restaurants, etc.

Ken

---

From: Tony Hansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:08:12 -0400

Another option to consider is to do the same thing that was done to the
[email-masked] list years ago: split it up into a list of important
announcements that only the secretariat can post to, and a list of
general interest items that anyone can post to. The announcement list
would handle the schedule change announcements and would need to be
extremely low traffic. The general interest list would let people post
about local restaurants, local beer choices, etc.

In addition to offering an optout for the subscriptions at registration
time, have the list manager send a message to each person subscribed
indicating what the list is about and *how to unsubscribe*.

The lists *should* follow all the standards and good practices for
mailing lists found in RFCs 2369, 2418, 2919 and 3934.

	Tony Hansen
	[email-masked]

---

From: "Yaakov Stein" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:12:19 +0200

> Having a per-meeting special list has an obvious and reasonable basis.
> However it makes each meeting's list a special case for IETF
administration and for attendees.  
> Possible variations to consider:

I think the best variation is automatic resgistration to meeting list,
but to use this list only for urgent messages (either from secretariat,
or allow from others bu moderated to allow only urgent messages
through).

All messages about download speed of cookies and healthfullness of WiFi
should be directed to discussion list. This way everyone's existing
email rules 
function as desired, and the emails are archived so that we can later
compare
meetings from the point of view of cookie speed, WiFi health, etc.

Y(J)S

---

From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:50:00 +0200

Ken Raeburn wrote:
>> administration and
> per-meeting names with a known, simple pattern 
> (ietf$MEETINGNUM-attendees?) might be better, if a little harder to 
> match in some filter software.
>
>
hey - I like looking at the cookie discussion even when I'm not there!

            Harald, who's on holiday this time - have a good one!

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2006 08:36:08 -0400

Tony Hansen wrote:
> [email-masked] list years ago: 

All of tony's suggestions (in this note) seem like an excellent path to pursue.

d/

---

From: Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 02:00:58 -0400

> Experiment provided valuable information.

People don't like to be subscribed to mailing lists without their consent.
They also don't like to be experimented upon without their consent.

I think the former fact is fairly well-known within the IETF, and would 
have been revealed, along with people's specific preferences, if the 
question had been raised here prior to conducting the experiment.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <[email-masked]>
   Sr. Research Systems Programmer
   School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA