Subject: [Manycouches] ways to slow list traffic down --- Re: [Add] Slowing the list traffic down a bit: listening more and saying less

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 13:43:05 -0400

Back in March, we discussed ways in which to focus people for
virtual meetings.  One of those ways was to change the pace of
list traffic.  I'm not sure if anyone wrote up the requirements clearly.

Barry is going to attempt to do this manually, and I think it would be
useful to figure how this might be work out.

Barry Leiba <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > Hi, all.

    > As we all know, the ADD mailing list is a very high-volume one, both
    > in the sense of quantity and in the sense of “loudness”.  It’s clear
    > that a lot of the discussion is productive and important to have.
    > It’s also clear that a lot of it isn’t as productive, and doesn’t
    > contribute to moving the conversation forward.  We’re often talking
    > without also listening.

    > I think it’s important that we slow things down a bit listen to each
    > other, and think more about what we’re saying — and whether what we’re
    > about to say adds value, or just repeats points that were already
    > made.  So here’s what I’m going to do:

    > As soon as I send this, I’m going to put the ADD list in moderation.
    > That means that no posts will go directly to the list.  Instead,
    > they’ll come to the list moderators first, and we’ll have to release
    > them for posting. For now, that’s me: I’m taking responsibility for
    > this.  (A side note: the BoF chairs, Dave and Lars, did a great job
    > chairing the BoF, and I thank them very much for that.  But they did
    > not sign up for managing/moderating the mailing list, and I’m not
    > asking them to.)

    > I will not be releasing posts in real time.  A few times a day, I’ll
    > have a look at the queue and browse the messages.  Those that are
    > aimed at moving the conversation forward will be released to the list
    > and posted as usual, albeit with some delay.  Those that are not may
    > be rejected.  For some, where it seems there’s value but in my
    > judgment the tone is snarky or insulting, or may otherwise raise
    > hackles unnecessarily, I might contact the poster and ask that person
    > to think about the wording and consider re-posting.

    > I’m hoping that this will keep an important discussion moving, and
    > will increase the useful content.  Note that I’m not calling anyone
    > inparticular out here.  I’m looking to address the overall usefulness
    > and professionality of the discussion on the list.  Note also that I’m
    > not going to be perfect in my assessment of things.  Please, if I
    > contact you (or, as might happen, reject your post) and you think I’m
    > being over-sensitive or just plain wrong… bear with me.  Understand
    > that I’m doing this in good faith, and try not to be upset, but to
    > work with me on making this discussion what it needs to be.

    > Also remember that I’m in the U.S. Eastern time zone (New York), and
    > that I do sleep.  Posts from Europe won’t be handled until
    > mid-afternoon your time, and those from Asia not until late evening
    > and the middle of the night.  Perhaps one of my AD-colleagues from
    > Europe will be willing to join me in moderating these posts.  For now,
    > it’s going to be just me, and time zones are that they are.

    > Thanks, everyone, for your participation… and, in advance, for your
    > understanding.

    > Barry, ART AD

    > --
    > Add mailing list
    > [email-masked]
    > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/add

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 15:05:27 -0400

> useful to figure how this might be work out.

I have recently wondered if it would make sense for a list to have a 
quota - say two messages per person per day.

I suspect what would happen is that active list participants would batch 
all of their replies, and probably address several messages in each 
reply.   This could help a little bit with volume because sometimes one 
says more-or-less the same thing in each of several replies.   Having to 
send fewer messages might encourage participants to take a step back and 
address topics more broadly rather than nit-picking each message they're 
replying to.

But a quota might also do more harm than good, though, because batched 
replies would make it harder to keep track of individual threads and issues.

Keith

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 11:22:29 -0800

> replies would make it harder to keep track of individual threads and

I think it's important for thinking about these sorts of issues to
include incentives among the various considerations, and I do think
that quotas will tend to incentivize long, multi-topic pieces of mail.
I'm actually not sure I love moderating every post, either, but we'll
see how things go and what we learn with the add experiment.

Melinda

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 20:51:51 -0400

> see how things go and what we learn with the add experiment.

ideally, it would be nice to be able to limit replies on a per-thread basis.
That way, the batched replies would deal with a common topic.

The obvious hack is to start new threads for new topics.  That in of itself
might be a positive thing.

---

From: Mike Bishop <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2019 15:10:53 +0000

For actual new topics, sure.  I won't mention the list, but I recently had someone changing the subject on every reply; made the conversation nearly impossible to follow.

-----Original Message-----
From: Manycouches <[email-masked]> On Behalf Of Michael Richardson
Sent: Monday, August 26, 2019 8:52 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [Manycouches] ways to slow list traffic down

The obvious hack is to start new threads for new topics.  That in of itself might be a positive thing.

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works  -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2019 19:46:26 +0200

IMHO, at the point in time when a disucssion on a mailing list becomes
unbearing, its time to attempt to structure the information on a wiki.
This requires to have some form of editor that isn't committed to one
side of an arguemtn but willing and able to merge/structure/compress
arguments raised.

Of course, wiki can be seen just as a more collaborative editing way
for something tha ideally might turn out to become an RFC in the end
to become a more immutable representation of the discussion after a
while.

I could think of some type of tooling between mailing list and wiki,
such as forums, but i don't think that what exists today is actually
any better than email or wiki.

On Tue, Aug 27, 2019 at 03:10:53PM +0000, Mike Bishop wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> Manycouches mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/manycouches

-- 
---
[email-masked]

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2019 14:36:05 -0400

mcr> The obvious hack is to start new threads for new topics.  That in of
    mcr> itself might be a positive thing.

Mike Bishop <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > For actual new topics, sure.  I won't mention the list, but I recently
    > had someone changing the subject on every reply; made the conversation
    > nearly impossible to follow.

So, unless they removed References: and In-Reply-To:, it should thread
anyway.  If not, your MUA is broken :-)

But, yes, that's the rub: how to make the topics useful.

And then there are people who top-post, I guess because they poor MUAs.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2019 15:40:02 -0400

> unbearing, its time to attempt to structure the information on a wiki.

Ugh.  I personally find it maddening to try to keep track of a 
discussion when it migrates from one medium to another.   One virtue of 
using a mailing list is that (nearly) all of the conversation ends up in 
the same place.   While I acknowledge that a wiki or similar shared 
document can be useful, I think there needs to be a way to tie it all to 
email.   Same considerations apply to git repos.

Keith

---

From: Wes Hardaker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 16:38:22 -0700

> list traffic.  I'm not sure if anyone wrote up the requirements

I had mentioned in our couch-round discussion I think that I wanted
create a virtual "mic line" using recorded videos/presentations where
anyone that wanted to respond to others would functionally get 2 spots a
day in line, upload their video(s) to the discussion thread.  The goal
of 2 a day solves some of the timezone issues, as well as forces people
to think completely, clearly and come up with a good presentation (or
not) to put behind their arguments.
-- 
Wes Hardaker
USC/ISI

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 19:42:58 -0400

On 8/28/19 7:38 PM, Wes Hardaker wrote:

> day in line,

Maybe a bad analogy?   IMO the mic line has killed more productive 
discussion than any single other change to IETF from early days, even 
more than PowerPoint if that's possible.

Keith

---

From: Wes Hardaker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2019 07:19:32 -0700

> more than PowerPoint if that's possible.

Well, that may be the case but it's the closest analogy we have.  I like
*threaded* mail readers (and don't see how anyone reads IETF mail
without thread trees), and well written/described/thought-out
conversations.  I think I'm trying to combine the benefits of both mic
lines and threaded email.  I agree that too much formalism (eg
powerpoints) can get in the way, but so can too little.

[side note: I tell all newcomers into the ietf when I meet them to read
up ahead of time, because our usual power point presentations assume you
understand the issues and don't have background/overview slides most of
the time]

-- 
Wes Hardaker
USC/ISI

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2019 10:46:41 -0400

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 29, 2019, at 10:19 AM, Wes Hardaker <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> lines and threaded email.  

I use threaded email only rarely.  More often than not I find that it gets in the way more than it helps, because people don’t reply in neat little threads and the things people said in other threads are still relevant to the conversation.  If I’m reading only one thread in a conversation I feel like I’m missing important context.

I find mic lines an abomination, or at best a necessary evil.  I accept that either with a large number of participants, or when trying to accommodate remote participants, there needs to be some discipline to keep a few people from grabbing all of the bandwidth.  But mandatory mic lines killed the ability to quickly find solutions to tricky problems that rapid face to face interaction once facilitated.  

The meta point is : let’s not presume that the mechanisms we currently use are inherently good ones just because we’re accustomed to them.  

> I agree that too much formalism (eg

Formalism isn’t the worst problem with PowerPoint.  The worst problem with powers is that it often kills discussion - it encourages people to think that their role is to be a passive audience rather than active participants.  A related problem is that PowerPoint severely limits the amount of information that can be conveyed in an image, such that you sometimes need several PowerPoint slides (and several minutes per slide) to convey a single idea.   Writing on transparent sheets of plastic that were optically projected was actually much more effective , and you could annotate such slides in real time.  Another issue with PowerPoint is that speakers feel like they need to sync what they’re saying to what’s on the screen at the time (often doing little more than reading the words on the screen).  This is backwards- the speaker should be interacting with the audience, and adapting what he/she says as needed.  The visuals should be flexibly supporting the speaker, rather than the speaker following a predetermined script.  It’s supposed to be a discussion, not a performance.   And finally with PowerPoint there’s a presumption that everything said should be in the slides, which again stymies interaction and hinders resolution of issues more than facilitating it.

Keith

---

From: Wes Hardaker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2019 07:57:24 -0700

Keith Moore <[email-masked]> writes:

> The meta point is : let’s not presume that the mechanisms we currently
> use are inherently good ones just because we’re accustomed to them.

We certainly agree here: we can't think outside the box if we're
unwilling to discard the box.

> Formalism isn’t the worst problem with PowerPoint.  The worst problem
> with powers is that it often kills discussion - it encourages people
> to think that their role is to be a passive audience rather than
> active participants.

I actually think the biggest problem with power point is that it gives
too much power to the speaker.  In an organization that strives to
produce documents from many voices, it always seems like the speaker
with the slides gets the final vote.

> It’s supposed to be a discussion, not a performance.

Some people do a good job at presenting a problem in slides, and then
starting a follow on discussion that typically works (IE, the point of
the slides is to *end* and then the discussion starts).

-- 
Wes Hardaker
USC/ISI

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2019 11:38:55 -0400

> with the slides gets the final vote.

I probably agree with that.   I do think that a speaker, or a document 
editor, does have a special (and necessary) role of creating a coherent 
and self-consistent view from many (often conflicting) opinions.   But 
at least in the context of a working group discussion, the speaker's 
role should usually be more one of eliciting opinions and feedback, than 
of telling people how things are.

> the slides is to*end*  and then the discussion starts).
Occasionally I've seen speakers keep their slides to an absolute minimum 
so that there's plenty of time left for discussion.   This is difficult 
to do because PowerPoint imposes such severe limitations on what can 
effectively be shown on one slide (admittedly part of the problem is the 
limited resolution of computer screens).   But it's much appreciated 
when they do that. Something that can also be done is to have additional 
material (especially drawings) prepared and available for presentation 
(say after a blank slide) if it's useful in a discussion.

I also think it's possible to structure a deck in such a way as to 
facilitate discussion while the slides are being projected (as opposed 
to waiting until they're done), but the speaker still has to overcome 
viewers' habits of passively reading text from the screen (or reading 
email while the slides are up).

Keith