Subject: Affiliate Groups -- social type groups and lists....

From: Warren Kumari <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2019 17:15:29 -0500

Hi all,

The IETF is composed of a bunch of working groups, all doing serious
standards work, and made up of serious standards people talking about
serious matters... but, when we are not doing serious stuff, some have
hobbies and (non-IETF) interests.

Many of us spend 3 weeks or so a year together. Some of us share these
hobbies[0] already and some of us may wish to share more. To make it
easier for IETF participants to find existing hobby groups and create
new ones, we have created an Affiliate Groups page on the IETF web
site and a simple mechanism for creating new groups.  We are not
trying to take over any existing groups, we are just creating a
convention that people can use if they want.

Affiliate Groups (AG) allow IETF people to (self organize) around
interests, hobbies, outside activities, and similar. They are
explicitly *not* for doing / discussing IETF work, and are instead
intended to be social - IETF work should happen in Working Groups, and
new work described in BoFs / bar BoFs.

So, what exactly is an AG / what does it get?
An AG is basically just a group of people interested in a topic - examples
of things which might become AGs are rock-climbers, HAM operators,
guitarists, runners, pipe-organ enthusiasts, photographers,
sushi-lovers, etc. This isn't an attempt to formalize these, rather it is
just a way to help people (especially newcomers) find out about them.

All that an AG gets is a mailing list (<something>[email-masked]), and
gets listed on a webpage.

Example: https://www.ietf.org/about/groups/affiliate/

Affiliate Groups are not special, they don't get any preferential
treatment if asking for a side room, the organizers don't get dots on
their badges, etc.

Questions:
Q1: Meh. So, how is this different from just having a mailing list,
like e.g runners already has?
A: It's not very different at all - basically this just helps others
find out about your group; we already have a number of these sorts of
self organized groups, but many of them are unknown to people not
already in the group. This is basically just creating a catalog of
groups, and starting a *convention* where new groups / mailing lists
of this ilk end in -ag (to help make them easier to find, etc).

Q2: Great, I'm sold! I'd like to form the Extreme Ironing Affiliate
Group - there are dozens of us interested in this sport...
A: Great! All you have to do is request a new mailing list and make it
clear that you’d like it to be listed as an affiliate group. The
procedure for requesting a mailing list is at [1].
I'm the current stuckee / champion for affiliate groups, so send your
requests to me.
In order to cut down on clutter, we'll go through the list every few
years and see if any of them are sufficiently dormant that they should
be closed down, but the main idea is that these are
self-organized, and incredibly low touch.

Q3: Gah, you haven't listed the soapcarving / birdwatching /
sword-swallowing / <whatever> group....
A: 'pologies. Plese send me: A the name of the group, B: a short (2 or
3 sentence) blurb to put on the webpage and C: a pointer to your
mailing list. Please also put "Affiliate Group" in the email subject -
I don't know how many of these I'm going to get, and I don't want to
lose track of them.

Q4: Is this really the most important thing that the IESG could be working on?!
A: Nope, not by a long shot -- but it's something that *I* felt was worth doing,
and the rest of the IESG agreed, somewhat so I'd stop talking about it :-)

Q5:  Does the Note Well apply to these groups?
A: Yes. Any email sent to IETF lists is considered an IETF
"Contribution" as defined in RFC 5378, Section 1 (see also the NOTE
WELL statement), as is anything which you intend to influence the
standards process -- but, these really are intended to be social type
groups, and so if you are talking about standards stuff, you are doing
it wrong! And while these are social-type groups we have the same
expectations around conduct as apply to all formal IETF activities. If
you have questions about how any of the IETF’s policies apply to
affiliate group activities, please contact [email-masked].

W
----
[0]: Many of which are frankly somewhat nerdy, says Warren, the ham
radio operator....
[1] https://ietf.org/how/lists/nonwglist-guidelines/

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From: Alexander Pelov <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2019 23:52:49 +0100

Hi Warren,

Thanks for organizing this! I love it!
(Already subscribed to HAM AG - I've always been curious but never really
got near some real hardware..)

I'll be looking forward for the other AGs as well!

Cheers,
Alexander

PS
After two Singapore and one Bangkok meeting I'm starting to think about a
Durian aficionados list ;)

---

From: Dick Franks <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2019 15:01:06 +0000

On Tue, 17 Dec 2019 at 22:53, Alexander Pelov <[email-masked]> wrote:
> ...
> After two Singapore and one Bangkok meeting I'm starting to think about a Durian aficionados list ;)

Some hotels in SE Asia will bill you $100 for ridding your room of the
lingering stench.