[Bigbang-dev] activity in mailing lists and correlation to meetings, draft publications

[Stephen McQuistin]

Hi,

I haven’t looked at mailing list data for the IETF, but I have looked at how Internet-Draft submission dates relate to meetings:

[cid:431D4D7F-C8BB-4567-B17D-9BBC73AE01BF]

This plot shows the counts of drafts submitted on each day for the 12 weeks to the cut-off date before IETF 107 (which was rescheduled as a virtual meeting after the cut-off date). Having a cut-off date leads to a spike in submissions (around 25% of the submissions were on the last day), and creates a lot of new work for discussion. The implication of the cut-off is that this discussion will take place in the following meeting, but it would be interesting to determine how much of that takes place/starts on the mailing lists.

The Datatracker API (and via the ietfdata library - https://github.com/glasgow-ipl/ietfdata) exposes a lot of the data needed to look at this, including meeting dates (and I-D submission cut-off dates), along with draft submission metadata.

Stephen

On 13 Jun 2020, at 21:23, Nick Doty <npdoty at ischool.berkeley.edu<mailto:npdoty at ischool.berkeley.edu>> wrote:

Hi all,

On May 22, 2020, at 1:42 PM, Sebastian Benthall <sbenthall at gmail.com<mailto:sbenthall at gmail.com>> wrote:

Thanks for the productive call, everyone.

Here are the notes, copied from the Etherpad.
I look forward to being in touch with you as things progres..

Best regards,
Seb

NEXT STEPS: RESEARCH
=====================

For the next phase of Article 19 supported work, new and earlier BigBang functionality will be used in new Jupyter notebooks answering research questions of community interest.

What are the most pressing research questions?

Solicited from the meeting attendees:
   - From J.S:
• - Correlation between activity in mailing lists and drafts produced by working.
• -

Regarding this style of research question raised by Joey, I had similar questions about whether mailing list activity would track closely with publication of drafts of W3C specs or with W3C WG face-to-face meetings. There isn’t an API/machine readable data source in the same way that IETF has its Datatracker, but I was able to import dates for f2f meetings and draft publications for the Tracking Protection Working Group (which I worked on and study) and create these timelines:

https://github.com/npdoty/bigbang/blob/tpwg-timeline/tpwg/public-tracking-activity-timeline.png
https://github.com/npdoty/bigbang/blob/tpwg-timeline/tpwg/public-tracking-activity-yearly.png

Just looking at those timelines qualitatively, there are some connections to meetings, where there’s more mailing list traffic leading up to a meeting or following a meeting.

The publications dates seem to have less connection. In some ways that makes sense to me: Working Draft publications at W3C are supposed to be heartbeat-style (it might be that I-Ds are supposed to follow that style as well) and published somewhat regularly as snapshots. “Last Call” or document transitions (to Candidate Recommendation, for example) are more notable steps in the process, but those also aren’t especially dramatic in terms of discussion activity: for this group (and this should be common at W3C) the issues are being hashed out by the group before those milestones, and while there may be some public comments and responses to public comments afterwards, that’s generally less active because the WG has already discussed the controversial issues by then.

I’d be interested to compare with anyone else doing this kind of analysis, especially if the IETF Datatracker can provide it for many groups at once.

Thanks,
Nick
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