[gnso-rpm-wg] Message from the Co-Chairs Regarding Email List Management

[George Kirikos]

Hi folks,

On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 12:34 PM, Mary Wong <mary.wong at icann.org> wrote:
> We welcome your responses, and in particular your suggestions for how we can
> narrow our discussion points at any given time and encourage members to stay
> focused on the main point under discussion -- while also accommodating the
> fact that there is some substantial interdependency between the issues we
> are grappling with.

I had a few suggestions:

1. I suggest that folks try to trim the quoted emails that they're
responding to, in order to shorten the length of the text to just the
relevant/essential part(s) of the prior emails (as I just demonstrated
above), plus anything new they wish to contribute. It makes it a lot
easier to follow the threads, especially when some of the threads
included 50+ prior emails within the body of the message. It also
improves searching one's own email archives, to generate fewer matches
when searching for something (e.g. if I searched for specific text,
I'd currently find that text not only in the original email, but also
in dozens of followup emails, making it tougher to find what I'm
looking for).

To pick a random example, see how the following message has "+1" as
the "new" text:

http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/gnso-rpm-wg/2017-May/001945.html

but one would really have a hard time figuring out what's being
supported, unless one read all the prior messages included below that
new text.

2. Sometimes it's worth changing the Subject line of the email
entirely, especially to make it easier to find things later when using
the web-based archives. There are numerous emails in the archive for
May 2017:

http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/gnso-rpm-wg/2017-May/date.html

concerning "Agenda and documents for Working Group call this week",
but the actual content of some of those messages concernsabout policy
discussions (e.g. about GIs, etc.), so the subject line could have
been changed to reflect that.

3. Some of the "legal disclaimers" that are included automatically at
the bottom of emails perhaps can be removed entirely (e.g. "This
message is confidential, blah blah blah"), to further reduce message
length. This is a public mailing list, and is archived on the web. For
those who've setup a dedicated email address/account for ICANN mailing
lists, that's easy to do. For those who are currently using just one
email address for business and ICANN-related matters, it might be wise
to consider creating a separate email address for public mailing
lists.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
416-588-0269
http://www.leap.com/