Message from the Co-Chairs Regarding Email List Management
Dear all, Please see the message below from all the three Co-Chairs of this Working Group. ___________________ Last week we learned that the Co-Chair of another PDP Working Group had placed a temporary halt on ongoing discussions because the volume of emails had grown so large, and the discussion so diffuse, that no one could any longer keep up with the dialogue or identify the main focus of discussion. While your Co-Chairs have not yet felt the need to impose a similar moratorium, we are aware that certain discussion strings have of late totaled dozens of emails, and have occasionally wandered significantly afield from the main topic. We are also concerned that several WG members recently changed to observer status, citing an inability to keep up with the volume of emails as well as, in some cases, concerns about the caustic tone of some communications. In regard to the tone of our online discussions, the Co-Chairs have noted a recent decline in personal remarks and more serious and well-reasoned debate on the issues before us. Let’s keep it up. In order to assure that we all make the most efficient use of our limited time, and increase the quality while decreasing the quantity of this WG’s email traffic, we propose the following for your consideration: 1. Please refrain from sending an email that lacks any new content and/or simply repeats positions heard from other WG members. In particular, if you feel compelled to send a “+1” or “Agree” message please just hit “Reply” and not “Reply All”. That way the sender of the original message will know of your support without the other 150-plus members of the WG having to take time away from their other work. Of course, if you want to add additional facts and arguments concerning why you agree or disagree with another member’s statement please go ahead as we welcome such substantive contributions. 2. Please be civil to your fellow members and try to focus any criticisms on the substance of a proposal or assertion and not on the person who made it. Reasonable people can disagree, and none of us have a monopoly on the truth. Remarks that question a person’s intelligence or motives, or that are caustic in tone, tend to polarize ongoing discussions and impede our work. As the PDP process requires significant consensus to advance change, pleased focus on identifying common ground and widening it. Those are our thoughts, and we share them with you not because we think this WG is going off the rails but because we believe it would be advantageous to consider how we can best use our email list to advance our work in the most efficient way, especially as the volume and importance of our work increases. We welcome your responses, and in particular your suggestions for how we can narrow our discussion points at any given time and encourage members to stay focused on the main point under discussion -- while also accommodating the fact that there is some substantial interdependency between the issues we are grappling with. Thank you and best regards, Philip J Scott Kathy
Hi folks, On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 12:34 PM, Mary Wong <mary.wong@icann.org> wrote:
We welcome your responses, and in particular your suggestions for how we can narrow our discussion points at any given time and encourage members to stay focused on the main point under discussion -- while also accommodating the fact that there is some substantial interdependency between the issues we are grappling with.
I had a few suggestions: 1. I suggest that folks try to trim the quoted emails that they're responding to, in order to shorten the length of the text to just the relevant/essential part(s) of the prior emails (as I just demonstrated above), plus anything new they wish to contribute. It makes it a lot easier to follow the threads, especially when some of the threads included 50+ prior emails within the body of the message. It also improves searching one's own email archives, to generate fewer matches when searching for something (e.g. if I searched for specific text, I'd currently find that text not only in the original email, but also in dozens of followup emails, making it tougher to find what I'm looking for). To pick a random example, see how the following message has "+1" as the "new" text: http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/gnso-rpm-wg/2017-May/001945.html but one would really have a hard time figuring out what's being supported, unless one read all the prior messages included below that new text. 2. Sometimes it's worth changing the Subject line of the email entirely, especially to make it easier to find things later when using the web-based archives. There are numerous emails in the archive for May 2017: http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/gnso-rpm-wg/2017-May/date.html concerning "Agenda and documents for Working Group call this week", but the actual content of some of those messages concernsabout policy discussions (e.g. about GIs, etc.), so the subject line could have been changed to reflect that. 3. Some of the "legal disclaimers" that are included automatically at the bottom of emails perhaps can be removed entirely (e.g. "This message is confidential, blah blah blah"), to further reduce message length. This is a public mailing list, and is archived on the web. For those who've setup a dedicated email address/account for ICANN mailing lists, that's easy to do. For those who are currently using just one email address for business and ICANN-related matters, it might be wise to consider creating a separate email address for public mailing lists. Have a great weekend, everyone! Sincerely, George Kirikos 416-588-0269 http://www.leap.com/
Hi Mary, One thing that ICANN could do that would really help in finding documents sent as attachments would be to modify the mailing list software so it doesn't add a ___________________________________________ gnso-rpm-wg mailing list gnso-rpm-wg@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gnso-rpm-wg to emails. Example here: http://gpm.info/msg.txt (txt copy of an example ICANN email). Scroll to the bottom to see the added text or see email-1.png attachment. The reason why it would be very helpful to remove this text is because what happens in many email clients is this information gets stripped off as a separate attachment. Where there are lots of emails this makes it very hard to quickly locate emails with attachments that contain useful information. This can be seen in the email-2.png attachment. In this you can see: (a) the arrow on the left hand side points to the emails with a paperclip indicating an attachment (22 of 24 the emails) (b) the circle on the right around the attachment from Massimo ATT00067.txt (240B) which only contains ___________________________________________ gnso-rpm-wg mailing list gnso-rpm-wg@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gnso-rpm-wg which is also shown circled in notepad. (c) the email from Julie which is the only email in that screenshot which has a real attachment worth reading! Many thanks, Paul. On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 6:02 PM, George Kirikos <icann@leap.com> wrote:
Hi folks,
On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 12:34 PM, Mary Wong <mary.wong@icann.org> wrote:
We welcome your responses, and in particular your suggestions for how we can narrow our discussion points at any given time and encourage members to stay focused on the main point under discussion -- while also accommodating the fact that there is some substantial interdependency between the issues we are grappling with.
I had a few suggestions:
1. I suggest that folks try to trim the quoted emails that they're responding to, in order to shorten the length of the text to just the relevant/essential part(s) of the prior emails (as I just demonstrated above), plus anything new they wish to contribute. It makes it a lot easier to follow the threads, especially when some of the threads included 50+ prior emails within the body of the message. It also improves searching one's own email archives, to generate fewer matches when searching for something (e.g. if I searched for specific text, I'd currently find that text not only in the original email, but also in dozens of followup emails, making it tougher to find what I'm looking for).
To pick a random example, see how the following message has "+1" as the "new" text:
http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/gnso-rpm-wg/2017-May/001945.html
but one would really have a hard time figuring out what's being supported, unless one read all the prior messages included below that new text.
2. Sometimes it's worth changing the Subject line of the email entirely, especially to make it easier to find things later when using the web-based archives. There are numerous emails in the archive for May 2017:
http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/gnso-rpm-wg/2017-May/date.html
concerning "Agenda and documents for Working Group call this week", but the actual content of some of those messages concernsabout policy discussions (e.g. about GIs, etc.), so the subject line could have been changed to reflect that.
3. Some of the "legal disclaimers" that are included automatically at the bottom of emails perhaps can be removed entirely (e.g. "This message is confidential, blah blah blah"), to further reduce message length. This is a public mailing list, and is archived on the web. For those who've setup a dedicated email address/account for ICANN mailing lists, that's easy to do. For those who are currently using just one email address for business and ICANN-related matters, it might be wise to consider creating a separate email address for public mailing lists.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Sincerely,
George Kirikos 416-588-0269 http://www.leap.com/ _______________________________________________ gnso-rpm-wg mailing list gnso-rpm-wg@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gnso-rpm-wg
I think George and Paul have very good suggestions, and appreciate the kind letter of encouragement from the co-chairs. I hope the folks who have changed to observer status will reconsider re-joining as full participants as we continue to make improvements going forward. There is no deadline to join. We all benefit from having your involvement and perspective inside this very talented and diverse group. Have a great weekend. Best, Claudio On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 4:17 PM Paul Tattersfield <gpmgroup@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Mary,
One thing that ICANN could do that would really help in finding documents sent as attachments would be to modify the mailing list software so it doesn't add a
___________________________________________ gnso-rpm-wg mailing list gnso-rpm-wg@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gnso-rpm-wg
to emails.
Example here: http://gpm.info/msg.txt (txt copy of an example ICANN email). Scroll to the bottom to see the added text or see email-1.png attachment.
The reason why it would be very helpful to remove this text is because what happens in many email clients is this information gets stripped off as a separate attachment. Where there are lots of emails this makes it very hard to quickly locate emails with attachments that contain useful information.
This can be seen in the email-2.png attachment. In this you can see: (a) the arrow on the left hand side points to the emails with a paperclip indicating an attachment (22 of 24 the emails) (b) the circle on the right around the attachment from Massimo ATT00067.txt (240B) which only contains
___________________________________________ gnso-rpm-wg mailing list gnso-rpm-wg@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gnso-rpm-wg
which is also shown circled in notepad.
(c) the email from Julie which is the only email in that screenshot which has a real attachment worth reading!
Many thanks,
Paul.
On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 6:02 PM, George Kirikos <icann@leap.com> wrote:
Hi folks,
On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 12:34 PM, Mary Wong <mary.wong@icann.org> wrote:
We welcome your responses, and in particular your suggestions for how we can narrow our discussion points at any given time and encourage members to stay focused on the main point under discussion -- while also accommodating the fact that there is some substantial interdependency between the issues we are grappling with.
I had a few suggestions:
1. I suggest that folks try to trim the quoted emails that they're responding to, in order to shorten the length of the text to just the relevant/essential part(s) of the prior emails (as I just demonstrated above), plus anything new they wish to contribute. It makes it a lot easier to follow the threads, especially when some of the threads included 50+ prior emails within the body of the message. It also improves searching one's own email archives, to generate fewer matches when searching for something (e.g. if I searched for specific text, I'd currently find that text not only in the original email, but also in dozens of followup emails, making it tougher to find what I'm looking for).
To pick a random example, see how the following message has "+1" as the "new" text:
http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/gnso-rpm-wg/2017-May/001945.html
but one would really have a hard time figuring out what's being supported, unless one read all the prior messages included below that new text.
2. Sometimes it's worth changing the Subject line of the email entirely, especially to make it easier to find things later when using the web-based archives. There are numerous emails in the archive for May 2017:
http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/gnso-rpm-wg/2017-May/date.html
concerning "Agenda and documents for Working Group call this week", but the actual content of some of those messages concernsabout policy discussions (e.g. about GIs, etc.), so the subject line could have been changed to reflect that.
3. Some of the "legal disclaimers" that are included automatically at the bottom of emails perhaps can be removed entirely (e.g. "This message is confidential, blah blah blah"), to further reduce message length. This is a public mailing list, and is archived on the web. For those who've setup a dedicated email address/account for ICANN mailing lists, that's easy to do. For those who are currently using just one email address for business and ICANN-related matters, it might be wise to consider creating a separate email address for public mailing lists.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Sincerely,
George Kirikos 416-588-0269 http://www.leap.com/ _______________________________________________ gnso-rpm-wg mailing list gnso-rpm-wg@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gnso-rpm-wg
_______________________________________________ gnso-rpm-wg mailing list gnso-rpm-wg@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gnso-rpm-wg
participants (4)
-
claudio di gangi -
George Kirikos -
Mary Wong -
Paul Tattersfield