On 9/18/2013 8:59 AM, John C Klensin wrote:
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.
If I learned nothing else while mis-spending the mid-2000s talking about IETF process change, it's that if you want anything to change, take the first step toward changing it.
If you can come up with a URN definition for ORCID and stuff it into your own author block as a URI without asking for permission or tooling changes, and you think doing so would be helpful, do it.
If three people include ORCIDs in their contact information during the next two years, we're probably done. If 300 people do it, we can talk about whether that turned out to be useful, and whether taking some other step would be useful, too.
There have been (counting me) four sitting ADs posting on this 90-email thread, plus another six or so former ADs, including a former IETF chair, plus at least six or so WG chairs, plus other participants of good mind and good hearts. I'm thinking that if it was possible to reason what the right answer should be, we would have all agreed.
Perhaps we've all agreed ("dear Jari, did we all agree?"), but if not, the next step could be to try something, and see if it's good enough, or if we need to try something else.
Spencer