On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 12:27 PM, Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I think that if some people support the idea, they can easily create a > wiki somewhere (e.g., "specsannotated.com") and get to work. If the > experiment has value, we'll figure that out. If not, well, it was just > an experiment. I agree. I was invited to this discussion by Yaron because I'm the creator of annocpan.org. First, let me say that I have been pleasantly surprised by the constructive behavior of annocpan contributors. There has been very little spam, very little fighting, and very little verbosity (while there is no strict limit on the size of the notes that people can post, the "sticky note" metaphor encourages brevity and facts instead of discourse). Perhaps the lack of spam and fighting in annocpan is because the traffic is modest, or due to the non-contentious nature of the documents that are being annotated. Each page is just the documentation for a freely available Perl module, take it or leave it, and is not the documentation for a protocol that people are expected to follow. It is possible that an annotated RFC would prove more contentious and noisy, but perhaps not. One way to find out is to try. Someone asked about the possibility of reusing the annocpan code. It is of course freely available and written in Perl, but I'm afraid it might be hard to disentangle from all the assumptions it makes about the way the (CPAN) documents are organized. But if anyone wants to try and has any questions, feel free to drop me a line. When I started annocpan it was as a completely "unofficial" site, whatever that means in the Perl world (although I did manage to obtain a grant from the Perl Foundation for support and encouragement). I did it because I thought it cold be useful, with very little discussion with the "authorities". Later, when a few other people were convinced that it could be useful, I got it to look a little bit more "official" by, for example, getting links to annocpan from search.cpan.org, which is the de facto "official" CPAN search site. I do think that annotated RFCs could be useful. You just need to make sure that it is clear that the annotations are unofficial additions and that the underlying RFC is the ruling document. However, my philosophy is that these types of projects are best started as bottom-up experiments. It is somewhat embarrassing when a big or respected organization tries to join some bandwagon by building an official [wiki|social networking site|forum|etc] and it fails. If one or more lonely experimenters fail, no one notices. But if they succeed, then they can be embraced by the organization with a product that is already useful and running. Plus, when you, the experimenter, start the experiment it is much more efficient to be able to be a "benevolent dictator" over your experiment, instead of having to discuss things over and over (be especially wary of "color of the bikeshed" types of discussions.) Hope this helps, Ivan _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf