Re: RE: [ga] Proposed GA Adcom

[John C Klensin <klensin@mci.net>]

Javier,

I think I need to respectively disagree...

One of our goals is to open the DNSO, and particularly the GA,
up to, and encourage involvement by, as many people as possible
who are interested in and impacted by DNS issues.   "As many as
possible" has to mean just that: excluding people on the basis
of cost of bandwidth or because they don't have excessive free
time on their hands may be as bad as excluding them because they
come from a particular region, or don't wear European-style
suits to work, or...

We all know that it is possible to drive a busy person away from
a mailing list (or a newspaper or magazine or radio station or
other medium) by making the signal to noise ratio bad enough
while keeping the volume high.  Different people have different
ideas about what constitutes "noise" and excessive volume, often
depending on what else is going on in their lives -- the level
of outrage some people manage to generate over three or four
spam messages a week is quite impressive-- but the problem is
pretty general.   (Before someone wonders, I hate spam and think
it is a scourge on the network, but it doesn't stimulate me to,
e.g., start making death threats against people and their
families.)

If we agree with the principle of maximum involvement, it is
important to keep the noise level on the list as low as possible
(I strongly prefer self-discipline here to network police of one
sort or another).    For someone who is busy and overloaded by
email, or who has to pay in scarce hard currency for each
message, the GA list already often produces "a ton" of mail.
And that, it seems to me, makes a very strong argument for each
person being forced to examine every message that he or she is
about to send to determine whether posting that particular
message to the list will really contribute to making the world a
better place.   List defaults that encourage casual posting
errors, or thoughts that are really of interest to only one or
two people, to go to the list don't contribute to that goal and
may contribute to the GA being less representative of those who
are impacted by the DNS and DNSO.

    john


--On Wednesday, 06 October, 1999, 11:01 -0500 Javier Rodriguez
<jrl@mail.lima.net.pe> wrote:

>...
> But... hey! this is the General Asambly (sp!) List... so...
> are sending to much garbage each other ? is there the risk of
> a ton of messages every day ? I dont think so... I hope so!  I
> ask the list administrator to change the system, so the REPLY
> will go to the GA LIST
>...