--On Wednesday, September 18, 2013 14:30 +0100 Andy Mabbett <andy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 18 September 2013 14:04, Tony Hansen <tony@xxxxxxx> wrote: >> I just re-read your original message to ietf@xxxxxxxx. What I >> had originally taken as a complaint about getting a way to >> have a unique id (in this case, an ORCID) for the authors was >> instead a complaint about getting a unique id for the people >> listed in the acknowledgements. >> >> I can't say I have a solution for that one. > > It wasn't a complaint, but a suggested solution, for both > authors and other named contributors. Andy, we just don't have a tradition of identifying people whose contributed to RFCs with either contact or identification information. It is explicitly possible when "Contributors" sections are created and people are listed there, but contact or identification information is not required in that section, rarely provided, and, IIR, not supported by the existing tools. That doesn't necessarily mean that doing so is a bad idea (although I contend that getting it down to listings in Acknowledgments would be) but that making enough changes to both incorporate the information and make it available as metadata would be a rather significant amount of work and would probably reopen policy issues about who is entitled to be listed. For those who want to use ORCIDs, the suggestion made by Tony and others to just use the author URI field is the path of least resistance and is usable immediately. A URN embedding has several things to recommend it over that (mostly technical issues that would be clutter on this list). You would need to have a discussion with the RFC Editor as to whether, e.g., ORCIDs inserted as parenthetical notes after names in Contributor sections or even acknowledgments would be tolerated or, given a collection of rules about URIs in RFCs, removed, but you could at least do that in I-Ds without getting community approval. If you want and can justify more formal recognition for ORCIDs as special and/or required, you haven't, IMO, made that case yet. Perhaps more important from your point of view, if you were, impossibly, to get that consensus tomorrow, it would probably be years [1] before you'd see complete implementation. best, john [1] Slightly-informed guess but I no longer have visibility into ongoing scheduling and priority decisions.