--On Wednesday, September 18, 2013 14:30 +0100 Andy Mabbett
<andy(_at_)pigsonthewing(_dot_)org(_dot_)uk> wrote:
On 18 September 2013 14:04, Tony Hansen <tony(_at_)att(_dot_)com> wrote:
I just re-read your original message to ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org. 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.