Re: IETF mailing list

[John C Klensin <KLENSIN at INFOODS.MIT.EDU>]

>As to mail list policies in general - I think that
>they should be "exclusionary" in nature. They
>ought only to list what types of discussion are not
>allowed instead of listing only the types of
>discussion that are allowed. The reasons are:
>
>1) If the discussion of list X is narrowly limited,
>   then there will be an explosion of lists. E.g.
>....

Frank,
  Your "reasons" are very interesting, not because I disagree (I don't, 
and have made similar arguments elsewhere), but because they are the 
same reasons that form the core of a different argument.  That argument 
says that, in general, the things we call "mailing lists" are poorly 
suited for the types of dialogue and conversation (rather than one-many 
"postings") that we use them for.  That argument goes on to suggest that 
one of the important evaluation criteria for a general purpose 
teleconferencing system is the ability to neatly hierarchicalize or 
network "meetings" (list, conferences,..) in a way that permits some 
people to focus on narrowly-defined things, others to see the broad, and 
no one sees more than one copy of anything because "cross-posting" 
becomes a virtual, rather than physical, activity.
  Now, if someone wanted to fund a project to develop one of those that 
would work well in a distributed, heterogeneous, Internet environment... 
:-)
   ---john
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