Subject: Flollow up from Admin Plenary

From: Kathleen Moriarty <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 15:19:39 -0400

Hello,

After the Administrative Plenary in Toronto, I took a little time to write
up a summary from my view point with some possible options for experiments
from the email list discussion.

http://www.ietf.org/blog/2014/08/mailing-lists-what-works-what-doesnt/

Any thoughts?

-- 

Best regards,
Kathleen

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 08:49:41 +1200

> http://www.ietf.org/blog/2014/08/mailing-lists-what-works-what-doesnt/

"There should be one place to look at all comments during last call for the draft editors, shepherds, and others."

This is the most important point you make. It doesn't actually need
to be fancy; it could be an enhancement of Tero Kivinen's review tool,
or an extension of the data tracker, with relevant emails captured of
course. It would greatly enhance the last call process.

    Brian

P.S. Anything that happens in twitterspace MUST be reflected in email, IMHO.

---

From: Kathleen Moriarty <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 16:52:31 -0400

On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 4:49 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> "There should be one place to look at all comments during last call for
> the draft editors, shepherds, and others."
>

Agreed.  I'm only suggesting this for announcements that would redirect
folks to drafts and other places for discussions.

-- 

Best regards,
Kathleen

---

From: Viktor Dukhovni <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 21:08:31 +0000

On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 08:49:41AM +1200, Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> "There should be one place to look at all comments during last
> call for the draft editors, shepherds, and others."
> 

A github for IETF drafts would substantially move us in that
direction.  In addition to tracking document revisions, github
supports in-line comments, pull requests, ...

In other words, a collaborative document editing system in addition
to the mailing list.

It would be nice if the document editing system were also able to
archive all mail messages pertaining to the review.  I don't think
that archiving of email messages and displaying email threads is
currently a feature of github.

The TLS working group has been using github for TLSv1.3 I believe,
perhaps their experience can be used to determine whether that's
a useful model.

-- 
	Viktor.

---

From: Walter Pienciak <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 15:49:15 -0600

The two points of focus I saw in your blog post were

- tools
- culture

Different populations based on age or social culture are often
familiar/comfortable with different modes of communication.  So this
discussion brings to mind the conversation on diversity in the IETF, as
being potentially relevant and beneficial there.

On a trivial level, software exists that can display e-mail list threads as
discussions in a forum, and vice versa, but the content is the same -- it's
simply the visual treatment that's changing, and the push/pull preference
of each individual user.

The amount of information being passed in a single communication
transmission -- and the consequent periodicity/volume of messages -- is to
my mind the main difference when comparing generational communications
preferences.  Certainly there's a faster turnaround -- and more constant
contact -- between friends constantly texting; on the other hand, more
thoughtfully and carefully worded text usually is found in e-mail.  (It's
hard for me to see protocol details being discussed/referenced/reconciled
via one-liner tweets ;^)

Experiments with new tools would be great.  A common problem with multiple
tools in the same functional space is partitioning of information among
tools.  A carefully chosen data architecture that minimized this would be
beneficial.

As far as changing the culture goes, we are the culture.  And the only part
of that culture I can really change is me.  All I can do is be respectful,
consider that people with different opinions may be thinking of different
experiences/data than I am, and try to avoid reflexive responses.  The old
"treat others as I'd like to be treated" thing.  While it's true that the
old-timers here have a lot of history and context, it is just as true that
epiphanies can't be scheduled or assigned.  They'll come out of the blue
sometimes from quite unexpected directions, and the culture needs to be
ready to capture them when they do.  Actually, I think the IETF has been
fairly effective at that.

Walter

Walter Pienciak
Senior Manager, Technology Community, IEEE Standards Association

[email-masked]
+1 303 527 0934

---

From: Kathleen Moriarty <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 18:11:04 -0400

Hi Walter,

Thank you for the thoughtful response.

On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 5:49 PM, Walter Pienciak <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> On a trivial level, software exists that can display e-mail list threads
> as discussions in a forum, and vice versa, but the content is the same --
> it's simply the visual treatment that's changing, and the push/pull
> preference of each individual user.
>

It's good to see the suggestions coming forward in this and other responses
for possibilities on this one.

> hard for me to see protocol details being discussed/referenced/reconciled

Good point! Yes, I don't think anyone is advocating for discussions to take
place in twitter, so we should be okay on that point, really just to try
using it in new ways to raise awareness on the work happening in the IETF,
hopefully disseminated to relevant groups of interested people from those
that follow the larger set of announcement tweets.

> tools.  A carefully chosen data architecture that minimized this would be

Noted and some suggestions are emerging from others, which is great to see.

>
> As far as changing the culture goes, we are the culture.  And the only
> part of that culture I can really change is me.  All I can do is be
> respectful, consider that people with different opinions may be thinking of
> different experiences/data than I am, and try to avoid reflexive responses.
>  The old "treat others as I'd like to be treated" thing.  While it's true
> that the old-timers here have a lot of history and context, it is just as
> true that epiphanies can't be scheduled or assigned.  They'll come out of
> the blue sometimes from quite unexpected directions, and the culture needs
> to be ready to capture them when they do.  Actually, I think the IETF has
> been fairly effective at that.
>
+1

>> After the Administrative Plenary in Toronto, I took a little time to
>> write up a summary from my view point with some possible options for
>> experiments from the email list discussion.
>>

-- 

Best regards,
Kathleen

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 20:09:04 -0500

> supports in-line comments, pull requests, ...

+1.  Or any other git-based commercial repository service.  (Even a
Fossil-based one, but please, no SVN.)

This is actually something where the IAOC could negotiate some sort of
deal with such a provider, since it'd probably be a PR coup for them to
provide such services to the IETF, and we might get the provider to
build certain features for us at lower cost / in less time than we might
otherwise get.

Alternatively, if we're not willing to go down this route, then please
develop better VCS-based I-D and RFC diff tools.

> currently a feature of github.

My ideal:

 - git (or Fossil, but preferably git; not SVN)
 - ticket system (not required to be tied to one repo / doc)
 - wiki
 - comment/review system with mail gateway
 - plain text friendly
 - mail/comment archive, searchable, robot-friendly

Currently we cobble these things together haphazardly out of existing
services.  I don't mind different WGs doing it differently, but we might
benefit greatly from a better integrated option.

Nico
--

---

From: Yoav Nir <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 12:09:29 +0300

> Fossil-based one, but please, no SVN.)

I was thinking about using for last calls a webpage containing:
 - the draft text
 - a message from the shepherd (writeup in the case of IETF LC)
 - links to any directorate reviews that have been received
 - Disqus comments.

I think a source control solution like git works better for document development in the WG, less so for IETF last call.

Yoav

---

From: "George, Wes" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 13:20:40 -0400

From: Walter Pienciak <[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>>
Date: Tuesday, August 19, 2014 at 5:49 PM
To: Kathleen Moriarty <[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>>
Cc: IETF <[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>>
Subject: Re: Flollow up from Admin Plenary

On a trivial level, software exists that can display e-mail list threads as discussions in a forum, and vice versa, but the content is the same -- it's simply the visual treatment that's changing, and the push/pull preference of each individual user.

WG] +1
For example: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/nanog/users/ which is read only but has nice formatting.

Or http://ietf.10.n7.nabble.com/IETF-IETF-f38488.html  that supports replies and has examples from IETF lists.

While I can see the value of collaborative editing tools such as Git that others have suggested, I think that only solves part of the problem (review and collaboration for documents), and doesn't address our needs for discussion that may not always be directly related to a given subsection of text in a draft.
I'd love for this sort of thing to be formally adopted by IETF  (rather than an unofficial thing) thus making it a supported tool with an ietf-managed email gateway that guarantees seamless discussion between email users and forum users, since this type of forum reply has good handling for quoting a part of a message inline and then replying to it, and generally bypasses a lot of the formatting foibles present in email (e.g. Outlook not doing format=flowed, people not making it clear which is their text and which is quoted for context, plain-text vs html, mangled subject lines breaking sorts by thread, etc.).  Not to mention it has good support for consumption via RSS, robust search, and depending on the implementation, good methods to filter/mute/subscribe to threads, good support for a profile that could be integrated into the author information available in tools like Jari's authors reports, etc.
Perhaps the starting point is to identify a way to use this as a formal experiment to determine if it has enough value to justify the added resources IETF would need to manage it.

Thanks,

Wes George

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