Subject: datapoint on large mailing lists

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2002 15:18:01 -0500

An observation on an issue related to the problems of large mailing lists.

Thomas
- ------- Forwarded Message

From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2002 04:45:04 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Recent Posting Stats

Over the past 8 days, I've received 526 postings on this list from 54
individuals, including this many from people posting 10 or more messages:

  10 From: Rob Austein <[email-masked]>
  11 From: Mark Smith <[email-masked]>
  13 From: [email-masked]
  15 From: "Richard Draves" <[email-masked]>
  15 From: [email-masked]
  23 From: Brian Haberman <[email-masked]>
  23 From: Pekka Savola <[email-masked]>
  27 From: "Hesham Soliman (EAB)" <[email-masked]>
  27 From: "Tony Hain" <[email-masked]>
  29 From: "Michel Py" <[email-masked]>
  35 From: "Bound, Jim" <[email-masked]>
  57 From: Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]>
  99 From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>

- -- George Mitchell ([email-masked])

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From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2002 15:22:58 -0600

>An observation on an issue related to the problems of large mailing lists.

This particular message doesn't indicate a problem with large mailing 
lists: Almost 75% (384) of those 526 messages were from 13 people. 
Something tells me that George wouldn't have been any happier with 
the mail generated by those 13 folks alone, and 13 people would be a 
nice small mailing list.

-- 
Pete Resnick <mailto:[email-masked]>
QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2002 16:38:52 -0500

> lists: Almost 75% (384) of those 526 messages were from 13 people. 

Pretty much the only interesting thing I learned in graduate
school is that everything follows a Zipf distribution.

Okay, so that's not really true, but the interesting things
I learned in graduate school follow a Zipf distribution too,
with a really skinny tail.

Melinda

---

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2002 16:44:26 -0500

> the mail generated by those 13 folks alone, and 13 people would be a 

Fair enough. More context is needed. On some large mailing lists there
is an issue with:

- 500 messages for a WG per week is hard for anyone to really
  follow. This tends to push away folk that we want to have
  participating.  Or, it leads to superficial discussion.

- 500 messages per week is hard to deal with on any list. But, such
  numbers are not so uncommon on a number larger groups/lists.
  
- on some of the threads, a small number of individuals post a
  disproportionate amount, in the sense that the sheer volume of text
  produced is hard to process or following what they are actually
  talking about (more than superficially) is just not possible.

- Or, I hear privately that folks don't even bother reading postings
  from certain individuals anymore. Often this is associated with a
  tendancy for some to rant whenever certain keywords are uttered by
  any poster.

- there is too much shouting and/or rebuttal/rebuttal, and not enough
  of an attempt to actually understand or find common ground.

In this particular case, it happens that a WG chair is one of the
frequent posters. It is also the case that her efforts have been quite
helpful IMO and there seems to some tangible progress on some fairly
difficult issues. So at one level, I should be happy and not complain.

But that progress is also not without pain. It is the pain part that I
believe is one example of a problem that gets in the way of IETF WGs
doing good work. That pain sometimes seems to effectively paralyze
WGs.

Thomas

---

From: James M Galvin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2002 17:23:21 -0500 (EST)

I'm not aware of any IETF mailing list that does this but perhaps we
should make "rate limiting" those who submit messages an option for IETF
lists?

The analogy here is to a room full of people with one microphone and one
line to get to the microphone; everybody gets to speak but only once (or
twice or thrice) a day (or every other day or every week)....

Personally I like this option better than "moderation" because it puts
the responsibility back on the originator, instead of some
"semi-arbitrary" moderator, and even better it distributes the job away
from the Chair.

With careful tuning this option can be very effective.

Of course, the downside is sometimes there is a person or two or three
you don't want subject to a limit...:-)

Jim

On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Thomas Narten wrote:

    In this particular case, it happens that a WG chair is one of the
    frequent posters. It is also the case that her efforts have been
    quite helpful IMO and there seems to some tangible progress on some
    fairly difficult issues. So at one level, I should be happy and not
    complain.

    But that progress is also not without pain. It is the pain part that
    I believe is one example of a problem that gets in the way of IETF
    WGs doing good work. That pain sometimes seems to effectively
    paralyze WGs.

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2002 07:18:46 +0100

Mentioning solutions before we agree on what the problem is is not my 
favourite discourse, but I thought I'd share this anyway.
Probably not appropriate for all contexts, but.....

In some contexts, I have seen imposed a posting limit of five messages per 
day per poster.

This has seemed to work well at times - if you find yourself yelling the 
same thing several times in email, it's often helpful to cool off until the 
day after anyway. (It can be a pain when you want to make Just One More 
clarification, but think of the pain you cause to others too....)

Also, it gives a formalistic, measurable metric for taking action against 
those who refuse to modify their behaviour so that others can be heard - 
this can be a nice tool for a list moderator who could otherwise be accused 
of personal animosity or technological bias.

(note - the last time I tried this was on the ICANN DNSO General Assembly 
list - NOT the most friendly of environments.....)

                          Harald

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From: Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2002 08:32:41 -0500

>In some contexts, I have seen imposed a posting limit of five messages per 

I don't agree with the idea of placing these sorts of arbitrary
restrictions on a discussion-oriented mailing list.  IMO, it is
important to have an open discussion forum that is less limiting
than a face-to-face meetings with lines for the microphone.

Just for the record, I've actually been pleased by the level of
progress that we've made in the discussion currently underway
on the IPv6 mailing list.  We've raised issues that would have
taken many, many hours to raise in meetings, and I think that both
sides have gained some appreciation for the fact that the issue
is complex and that there are good arguments on the other side.
We've been having this same argument in various semi-private
forums for over a year, and I'm glad to see both sides discussing
it with each other in a public forum.  We are (I hope) coming to
some idea of how to move forward, although we're still far from
a final answer.

Often, I think that managers use arbitrary restrictions to
substitute for active management.  If one person is making
inappropriate use of the mailing list, the managers of the mailing
list (the WG chairs) should talk to that person and ask him to
change his behaviour.  If that person repeatedly proves that he is
unwilling to change his behaviour, appropriate disciplinary action
should be taken (removal or limitation or posting privileges).

Placing a constraint on the number of posts for all users does
not address the real issue, encourages omnibus posts, and would
be irritating in many cases.

Besides, there are times when I am actively involved in more
than 5 conversations on a single IPv6-related mailing list at
the same time...

Margaret

---

From: "Carl" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Nov 2002 06:18:20 -0800

Hi,

I have seen a number of posts from you guys asking for more overall
architecture guidance for WGs.

I think this is the main dilemma for the IETF.

Although we have the Internet Architecture Board IAB, they don't really work
on Internet Architecture as one would expect from the name. It seems that
their only role at present is to jump in and try resolve problems, which
occur because there is no overall Internet Architecture and various WGs are
making independent tries to extend or amend how things are done on the more
detailed protocol level.

If I contrast that to the way the CORBA folks have been working, they have
put a great deal of emphasis on first defining the overall architecture and
have produced a number of overall architecture documents to which the WGs
that are designing protocols have to adhere. The CORBA folks may have been
less succesful in producing implementable and interoperable standards on the
protocol level, but I believe they got the architecture part right.

What is needed in the IETF is to have an active architecture group which,
pro-actively, works on the overall Internet Architecture aspects and
publishes RFCs which give clear guidelines to the WGs. I know this is not an
easy task, but if we don't try to solve it, it will continue to cause us
problems on the WG level. Obviously such an architecture group would have to
be responsive to requests for architecture extensions as they come up as
issues in the WGs.

Carl-Uno

Carl-Uno Manros
10701 S Eastern Ave #1117
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Tel +1-702-617-9414
Fax +1-702-617-9417
Mob +1-702-525-0727
Email [email-masked]

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2002 09:47:39 -0500

> Although we have the Internet Architecture Board IAB, they
> don't really work on Internet Architecture as one would
> expect from the name. It seems that their only role at
> present is to jump in and try resolve problems,

I think that's clearly not their only role, if you take a
look at the actual IAB activities over the past several
years (check the IAB website for the output from workshops,
have a read of recent IAB documents, ask an IAB member what
he or she has been doing).  I'd also say that they've been
identifying problems rather than resolving them - to the
extent that any WG problem resolution outside the working
group has been done it's been in the IESG, at least in the
working groups with which I'm involved.

I'm trying to picture an "internet architecture" and all I'm
seeing is layers and boxes and new acronyms and stuff that's
not going to help my working group very much.  I do think
that there are agreed-upon architectural principles and
these have been articulated pretty clearly in a number of
documents, both from the IAB and from others.  I suppose it
might be worthwhile to ask whether architectural principles
are insufficient and if we need an actual architecture as
well, but I'm not sure that question is answerable given the
large number of active participants in the IETF who are
either unfamiliar with those principles or reject them
outright.

Melinda

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2002 09:35:56 +0100

Carl-Uno,

If we knew what the architecture was, it would have been documented
years ago. This isn't a flippant remark. This is why RFC 1958 is
written the way it is.

The comparison with CORBA isn't valid. CORBA is a single tightly 
bound method of constructing distributed computing applications, 
defined using a precise description language. That's a small subset 
of the Internet space. 

I assert that it is categorically impossible to define a single 
architecture for the Internet. What we can do is describe roadmaps 
or architectures for subsets of the problem space. 

   Brian

---

From: "Carl" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Nov 2002 07:24:33 -0800

Brian,

I give you right that the CORBA space is much more limited, but I still
maintain that there is a need for architecture work in the Internet space,
even if it is much wider and may require several sub-architectures to
capture the whole elephant.

Carl-Uno

Carl-Uno Manros

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brian E Carpenter [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Monday, November 04, 2002 12:36 AM
> To: [email-masked]
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: Back to Harald's original question
>
>
> Carl-Uno,
>
> don't really work

---

From: "James Kempf" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Nov 2002 10:01:35 -0800

Taking off my WG chair hat for a moment and putting on my IAB hat, I've changed
the subject line because this thread has been touching on a problem that the
IESG and IAB have been discussing, but for which we don't really have an answer
yet, and I'm thinking perhaps the WG chairs might have some insight into how the
IETF could be more effective about where, when, and how to get more focus on
architecture.

The IAB typically doesn't get directly involved in an architectural problem
unless there is broad agreement with the IESG that there is a need for some
major architectural advice. The discussion about whether there might be a need
for some architectural opinion might be initiated by the IAB or it might be
initiated by the IESG, but typically the IAB's advice, as IAB, is not sought for
what I like to call "small" architecture. "Small" architecture can be
distinguished by the name "framework" within the document title. Many working
groups produce such documents at some point in their lifecycle. These documents
are handled by the usual WG/IESG/IETF last call process. "Big" architecture,
such as the OPES question or internationalizing DNS, is where the IAB typically
becomes directly involved.

In practice, its not so cut and dried. There is a lot of discussion among IESG
and IAB members, and the IAB members, as WG members or WG chairs,  are often
asked for their opinion on particular issues or even may participate as WG
members in drafting a "small" architectural or requirements document. At least
one IAB member, and often more depending on interest, are required to be at BOFs
to provide input to the IESG about any architectural questions raised by the
BOFs, and the IESG takes IAB input quite seriously when approving WGs.

The issue is whether to formalize a process somehow, and there has been
discussion about possible ways, but every suggestion is fraught with the
potential for unintended consequences. Having a specific group or special WGs
that specialize in architecture, like 3GPP does, runs the risk of splitting the
people who actually implement protocols from those who just talk about design,
which can lead to overly complex designs that are difficult to implement, as the
3GPP architecture appears to be. Up until now, the approach of using a set of
architectural principles for the Internet architecture, as exemplified by RFC
1958, rather than an enormous boxes and lines diagram seems to have worked well.
However, for individual pieces of the Internet architecture ("small"
architecture), it is often not clear how to map those principles directly to
specific protocol designs, and sometimes the intermediate step of a framework is
necessary, which is why the WGs generate them. The Internet has become more
complicated and it does seem to have become more difficult for any one
individual WG to understands what the consequences of its architectural
decisions might be on other parts of the Internet.

Anybody have some insights into where, when, and how might be the right time to
get more emphasis on architecture, and how we might get a wider review of the
impact particular "small" architectural decisions have on other parts of the
Internet?

                jak