Hi everyone I am going to preface this by saying that the MLC appreciates that transparency is of the most importance to the community, and that we have not lived up to this as completely as we should have.
We have recently been experimenting with thread moderation. The first thread to be moderated was the Cogent haiku thread which I mentioned during the NANOG 45 community meeting. For trivially off topic threads nothing was missed. So the community can see exactly what we have applied moderation to, the following is a complete list of regular expressions used: Subject: .*phishing attacks against ISPs.* Subject: .*Yahoo and their mail filters.* Subject: .*Akamai wierdness.* Subject: .*DPI or Flow Management.* Subject: .*Cogent haiku.* With a lack of follow up emails on list we can see how these actions can be construed as moderating individuals. The MLC has never moderated an individual and we have no intention to do this. The idea behind thread moderation was to make our job easier by spending less time sending warning emails to individuals, moderating individuals would be a tremendous amount of work for us. There is no formal policy on when and how thread moderation is applied, nor has there been any community discussion on this. I hope that we can take this as an opportunity for productive conversation about moderation. For now the MLC will use thread moderation only in the case of trivially off topic threads. The larger story is transparency in general. First, the painful lack of statistics. During the switch to Mailman existing scripts broke and the repair of this was neglected. The MLC is working with Merit to restore this functionality and will have updated statistics by end of day tomorrow. These are important so that everyone can see how much activity is happening within the MLC versus how much activity is happening on the list. During the last two community meetings I provided all available available statistics which are available in the community meeting slides and video (both on the NANOG web site). Second, the Steering Committee and the Program Committee both post meeting minutes on the web site but the MLC does not. The MLC does not hold regular meetings. Since May 30th, 2008 when the two longest sitting MLC members (Simon Lyall and myself) joined, there has been just three meetings, one of which was a joint SC/MLC meeting during NANOG 45 (minutes for this meeting are on the nanog.org web site). Without meetings there are no minutes to share, however, we will begin to post monthly summaries/updates of our activities starting at the end of April. We encourage discussion on nanog-futures and always welcome email at [email protected] . Kris Foster MLC Chair _______________________________________________ Nanog-futures mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures
