root cause issues in working group management

[Scott W Brim]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 03:50:32PM -0800, Fred Baker allegedly wrote:
> Let me take a specific example. Diffserv couldn't meet without a room that 
> sat 300 people, and on at least a few occasions required a room for 500. I 
> just did an analysis of my copy of the mail file (which probably doesn't 
> contain all the messages; I knocked out the spam and the rfc-editor mail 
> for sure, and probably deleted some other mail, so this isn't a perfect 
> test). But I analyzed 3741 messages sent to one working group's mailer over 
> a period of perhaps five years. In that time, a total of 410 people posted 
> to the list. 347 sent nine or less messages (154 sent a single message), 58 
> sent 10..99 messages, and a grand total of five got into triple digits. The 
> 30 most frequent posters were:

While agreeing with your final point (that the work is concentrated in a
small percentage of the participants), I have a small nit with your
methodology.  Participation was episodic.  At any point in the history
of the diffserv WG there was a small group that was active, but that
group changed over the years.  Some were active for a burst and then
went away.  My guess is that the active group at any one time was
actually smaller than your data suggests.