Subject: [78attendees] Please stop sending useless email to the list

From: "Ali C. Begen (abegen)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 03:30:29 -0700

I am not picking on somebody in particular, but almost 95% of the emails sent to this large email list is not useful at all to anybody. If you wanna reply to an email, just reply to the sender, do not reply to the whole list.

I rather wish I would not need to send this email and simply unsubscribed, but there are also important emails sent by the host. So, unfortunately that is not an option. Identifying such important emails among many spam-like emails is just a waste of time. So, please respect others' time and do not send a useless email to the list. 

If you are so interested in chatting with other IETFers, just ask the admins to create a list for your topics of interest.

Thanks,
-acbegen

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From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:41:49 +0200

> If you are so interested in chatting with other IETFers, just ask the admins to create a list for your topics of interest.

This list is that list.

We had similar complaints back when this type of discussion happened on the IETF discussion list ([email-masked]) and then these per-meeting lists were created.

Messages from the host etc go to [email-masked], so you can safely unsubscribe from 78attendees if you want.

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From: Ed Jankiewicz <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:00:47 -0400

I enjoy reading the list, and filter out things I don't care about, 
but understand the concern about signal-to-noise ratio.

The list is an excellent tool for:

1. asking a specific question that some random person attending the 
meeting might be able to answer
2. posting a bit of general information that most people attending the 
meeting might be remotely interested in
3. continuing a discussion that remains interesting to a good number of 
people on the list

As others have pointed out, one-to-one e-mail is the right tool for the 
degenerate case, where one person has something that only one or a small 
subset is interested in.  In between, some excellent tools exist that we 
could make more use of rather than cluttering the list:

wiki - for an evolving set of information that many people would be 
interested in, though not keen on integrating a long stream of list 
postings themselves.  E.g. "how to get from Schiphol to Maastricht" or 
"good restaurants near the MECC"  At previous meetings, there have been 
general interest wiki pages set up for the restaurants, shopping, etc. - 
I don't see any for IETF78, if anyone can point them out, please do.  
Otherwise, if you register/log in to IETF Tools you can create/update 
wikis and pages.  A good place is "Additional Events" wiki linked from 
the main meeting page.  A couple postings to the list could alert folks 
to the location of the wiki, trigger data collection, and take all the 
"sausage-making" off-list.
http://trac.tools.ietf.org/misc/venue/wiki/WikiStart.

doodle poll - to collect people, opinions, answers, etc. as used for 
"when to play soccer" at this and previous meetings.  Again, just a 
couple of postings to pose the question, point to the poll and finally 
post the results, without all the "me too" "rather tuesday" etc. 
postings.  Doodle is a great way to schedule sidebar meetings outside 
scheduled events.  http://www.doodle.com/

Also map tools (google maps, foursquare, etc) are great to share things 
you find around town.

Looking forward to seeing folks in Maastricht on Sunday.

Hope this posting meets my criteria for "interesting to most people on 
the list" - if so, no need to ditto/+1.  If not, you can reply to me 
individually!

edj