Subject: Creation of an "important-news" announcement list

From: IETF Chair <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2021 10:04:50 +0200

The IESG would like to thank the community for the feedback on the proposed
creation of an “important-news” mailing list
(https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/irtf-announce/ejTTtjtye40lrILz9z95iEAvJEk).

Here are our top take-aways from the public and private feedback:

1. A significant fraction of the feedback argues for reducing the types of
   messages that go to ietf-announce, and/or to digest some types of messages
   into periodic postings.

   One obstacle is that RFC 2026 requires announcements of various types to go
   to ietf-announce, preventing us from doing so without first updating RFC
   2026. But the community also does not seem to have consensus on what types of
   messages should remain, be moved, or sent as digests. Finally, it remains
   uncertain whether such refactoring of ietf-announce would result in an email
   volume low enough to be acceptable to many participants.

2. Multiple individuals expressed the concern that the proposed policy of CC’ing
   messages to important-news to ietf-announce would cause them to receive
   duplicate messages.

   This will happen, but the volume of emails to important-news is expected to
   be very low.  Additionally, most modern mail clients combine multiple
   messages with the same Message-ID into one, thereby hiding the issue.

3. It should be possible to individually customize which types of announcements
   one would like to receive.

   This is somewhat orthogonal to the question of whether a new important-news
   mailing list should be created.  Such functionality is under development, see
   https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tools-discuss/tczQzcpBhe6ppdu8VDN4OzWbPtA.
   Once available, subscriptions to important-news, ietf-announce and various
   other type-specific mailing lists can be managed easily and in one place.

4. An explicit opt-in step should be required for subscriptions to
   important-news.

   We believe that doing so would be a non-starter for something that intends to
   reach a large fraction of IETF participants - how would we announce it so
   people can subscribe? We instead hope that a one-click unsubscribe method
   will allow easy unsubscription for participants that are not interested in
   receiving a minimal amount of news from the IETF.

5. Some feedback was received that important-news should be created as an
   experiment.

   We could do this, but it remains a bit unclear what the success criteria for
   such an experiment would be, beyond establishing that important-news would
   reach a larger fraction of the community than ietf-announce. We note that
   scope and operational aspects of the important-news list can be tweaked
   without being run as an experiment.

6. Some other names than important-news were suggested for the new list.

   All names have various advantages and drawbacks, and important-news is no
   exception. The IESG believe the name important-news to be suitable for this
   new list.

Based on the received feedback, the IESG has decided to go ahead with the
creation of a new announcement list, as follows:

* The name of the new mailing list is important-news.

    * The ietf-announce mailing list will continue to operate as-is.

    * Posting rights to important-news are restricted to the same set of roles
      as for ietf-announce.

    * All emails sent to important-news will be CC’ed to ietf-announce.

* Posts

    * important-news will only receive important announcements that are manually
      sent by various organizational roles (and only the most important ones of
      those)

    * It will not receive any of the following types of messages that are
      (currently) going to ietf-announce:

       * Announcements of new and updated WG charters.
       * WG closure announcements.
       * Announcements of new non-WG mailing lists.
       * Announcements of new RFCs.
       * IESG and LLC telechat announcements.
       * Announcements of document actions.
       * Announcements of IESG conflict-review results.
       * Last call announcements for I-Ds.
       * Interim WG meeting announcements.

* Subscriptions

   * Every participant with a current Datatracker account will be automatically
     subscribed to important-news.

   * Every participant creating a new Datatracker account will automatically be
     subscribed to important-news.

   * Every new subscriber to any IETF mailing list will automatically be
     subscribed to important-news (unless they unsubscribed from it in the
     past).

   * important-news is also open to manual subscriptions to anyone without a
     Datatracker account.

   * A welcome message will be sent to new important-news subscribers,
     explaining what it’s for and that we’d hope they stay subscribed. It will
     also include instructions or ideally a link for one-click unsubscribing.

   * Any important-news subscriber can unsubscribe at any time, and we do not
     intend to automatically resubscribe individuals that have unsubscribed.

Creation of the important-news mailing requires some tooling changes to implement
the subscription process outlined above. The tools team is assessing these
implementation details. At the moment, it seems likely that they would be
significantly easier to realize after the planned migration to mailman v3. It
will therefore take some weeks or months before important-news can go live.

Lars Eggert
IETF Chair (on behalf of the IESG)