mailing list size/activity

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

--On onsdag, mars 12, 2003 17:44:55 -0600 Dave Crocker <dhc at dcrocker.net> 
wrote:

>
> We should pay far more attention to working group participation, both
> levels of activity and number of participants.
>
> I believe we have fallen into a pattern of looking at these in the
> early days of a working group, and then largely ignoring massive
> fall-offs.
>
> This means that later-stage work often has no meaingful range of input
> and no meaningful review.
>
> It also often means that it will have no meaningful adoption or use.

at the risk of harping on an old saw.... what are some examples of this 
pattern in Real Life?

I'll provide one that superficially fits the symptoms: MIXER (MIME/X.400 
gatewaying) - concluded March 1998.

- Enormous initial interest
- Just a few people commented on the final-final versions of the document
- The docs have NOT been widely adopted

Still, I will claim that in that case, I think there isn't much connection 
between the two last points; the final-final versions weren't that much 
different from what had gone before, which had had more extensive review, 
so we were pretty sure the basic concepts were unchanged; the reviewers who 
did read it were the world's experts in that particular esoteric field, and 
the real reason for the nonadoption is probably that by the time the 
documents got finished, there wasn't a viable X.400 community to gateway 
to, so the people who had already written gateways mostly didn't see the 
return on investment in making them fully MIXER compliant, and new entrants 
didn't see a return on investment on writing any gateway at all.

Thus, I see no particular connection between the amount of final review and 
the adoption rate - or if there is any, it is that the factors killing the 
adoption were also the ones killing the interest in review.

I've had the occasional comment that the docs were useful to implementors, 
though - I don't think the exercise was useless, just that it wasn't 
terribly important to the Internet in the end.

(Disclaimer: I'm author of some of the MIXER documents, so I'm inherently 
biased....)

                       Harald