Subject: [IRTF-Announce] Proposal: an "important-news" IETF announcement list

From: IETF Chair <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2021 10:25:55 +0300

Hi,

at the moment, ietf-announce is the main announcement list of the IETF,
seeing regular posts from various roles and bodies in the organization,
and from the Datatracker. Over the last year, ietf-announce has seen
around 1200 emails, averaging around 4.6 emails per workday.

The ietf-announce lists currently distributes the following types of
announcements. All but the first type are automatically generated by
various tools:

1.  Announcements sent manually by the IETF Chair, the IAB Chair, the
    IRTF Chair, the Chair of the LLC Board, the IETF Executive Director,
    the NomCom Chair, and the IETF Secretariat
2.  Announcements of new and updated WG charters
3.  WG closure announcements
4.  Announcements of new non-WG mailing lists
5.  Announcements of new RFCs
6.  IESG and LLC telechat announcements
7.  Announcements of document actions
8.  Announcements of IESG conflict-review results
9.  Last call announcements for I-Ds
10. Interim WG meeting announcements

The ietf-announce list currently has 3095 subscribers, which is a
fraction of the overall IETF community. Only 961 of these subscribers
have Datatracker accounts; out of 13311 overall Datatracker account
holders. When asking IETF participants about why they are not
subscribed, the volume of email on the list
- especially automatically-generated Datatracker email - is the most often
mentioned reason.

The IESG is therefore considering creating a new mailing list for
important organizational announcements only. We are hoping that a
subscription to a new low-volume mailing list will be acceptable to
IETF participants that find ietf-announce too noisy, and will help us
disseminate important news and announcements more widely and effectively.

Here are the details about this proposal:

* 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 the first type of announcements in
    the numbered list above, i.e., important announcements that are
    manually sent by various organizational roles.

  - important-news will not receive any of the other types of email sent
    to ietf-announce. In the rare case that one of these is of
    sufficiently broad community interest to be distributed via
    important-news, this will occur as a manual action by one of the
    roles authorized to post to important-news.

* 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.

  - 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 unsubscribing.

  - Any important-news subscriber can unsubscribe at any time.

The IESG is inviting community feedback to [email-masked] about this
proposal by 7 October 2021.

Lars Eggert
IETF Chair (on behalf of the IESG)