there is no 'solution' to this 'problem,' partly because we have not formulated it very well. is it how we discuss policy and politics? how we debug code? how we measure BGP and DNS? ... just as people have different learning modes: lectures, reading, videos, audio books, ... we also have communication media biases. and this is compounded by function. policy discussions are rather different than debugging. though i confess that forcing myself to describe the bug thoroughly in an email often reveals the solution while slack does not. and let's try not to be ageist. o as edward said, we have people entering the field mid-life as a second career. o i can not speak for the set of young, newcomers, etc. as i am not in those sets. speaking for others is akin to vendors saying "customers are not asking for IPv6." o others can and should be encouraged to speak for themselves. speaking for them is patronizing at best. we have mailing lists which are formal in the sense of being hosted and sanctioned by wgs and the ncc. we have ad hoc irc. i assume we have folk donating their text to discord's IP lawyers. what are the success stories? randy