Bob Braden wrote:
*>
*> The other thing that would be nice is a way of getting all of the
*> authors current contact info in one place and up to date.
*>
*> -MM
*>
If you have a good idea on how to keep contact information
up to date, the RFC Editor would like to know.
While perfection is unachievable (after all, eventually all contact
information will be out of date as the authors move on to a different
addressing space), I believe we can do somewhat better than today. There
used to be a handle system that assigned unique identifiers to people. A
separate database (call it "whois" or "LDAP" or whatever) then tracks
the current location. If you want to get fancy, have a ping mechanism
that sends email to each author periodically (once a year, say), as that
at least increases the chance of catching somebody as their old address
is still reachable.
(FWIW, I do something similar for conference paper management in EDAS,
where authors and reviewers get assigned a unique and random 32-bit
identifier. They keep the identifier even as their contact information
or even name changes.)
--
Henning Schulzrinne http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs