In another message, William B. Norton wrote:
I wish we had a metric for the community value of the nanog list.
I think that if the mailing list was moved from merit to its own server, and out from under the tyranny of majordomo to mailman, that you'd be shocked at the number of people who find the list valuable. Mailman's subscriber page, as you know, allows you to see the list of members, including offering up the metric of hidden members (i.e.those who don't want their email address displayed in that list).
Statistics (http://www.nanog.org/liststats.html) tell us how many people are on the list, and it is significant. This tells us it has an intrinsic value (rather than just a value to the top 40 or 50 posters).
Folks used to complain that the mailing list has become useless, too many msgs, too much noise, not much hate, etc. but we don't really have a way to measure the utility of the list. It is too bad we don't have a way to vote thumbs up or thumbs down on msgs. Could we implement something like that?
There is no way to truly measure goodness of a message, since it's not objective. Michael doesn't want to see "The Cidr Report" while I do. Random people are desperate to get issues important to them resolved, and they post messages such as "Road Runner (as10994) NOC contact?" Please note I am not making commentary on that particular message; it's just an example. There's value in both of those emails, but who decides?
I don't think of this as a democracy. I don't want to see it run as a democracy. One would hope that it is a meritocracy (apologies to Merit, but it's the only correct word). I like the method that says if you don't go to meetings, you don't get to vote. I went to a great deal of trouble to attend a meeting when it was local (at the time) to me. I'll make the sincere effort to go to another, just to keep that status. The Steering Committee is made up of people who were elected to that position (for the most part), and who work hard, as do the people who are on the MLC.
Messages to the list are in that precise category. Sometimes a topic will catch the attention of multiple people, and it will range far afield of what is or is not the listed areas of the mailing list. Is that good or bad? Messages from some people are going to be more useful than from others. It only takes a couple of weeks to figure out who the crazies are. It takes a bit longer to understand who is happy to waste time, and even longer to see who speaks authoritatively on a subject, and who is just blowing smoke.
I believe that the end-systems (http://www.nanog.org/endsystem.html) description still holds true (although it would make my copy editor eye happy if someone finally changed "relevent" to "relevant"). Whether Joe Abley (sorry, but I had to pick someone) thinks something is on topic, or interesting, is going to be more important to me than whether Andreas Voellmy (picked out of a hat, nothing implied) thinks it is.
-- Any commercial institution that is serious about protecting their customers from phishing will stop sending mail marked up with HTML.
