On 4/10/2025 11:06 AM, John R Levine wrote:
On Thu, 10 Apr 2025, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
Why not use ORCID?
Because any system that requires me as a user to sign up with yet
another
registry is broken.
We can certainly come up with a set of requirements that rules out any
system that exists or that that we could invent, but I don't see the
point.
Given that ORCID is used by over a thousand organizations to address
this issue, a stable identifier not tied to your name or job or e-mail
address, and those organizations include peers like the IEEE, I would
want a really really clear reason why we are so different that we
can't use it and why it would be a good investment of our time and
money to try and invent something else.
Keep in mind that nobody's forcing you to use it. If you don't want
to have an ORCID, we're no worse off than we are now. If you use an
email address in a domain you control, like you and I do, close enough.
I think it depends what we are trying to achieve. If the problem is
"author of an IETF document has changed employers three times, I need to
get the current email", then ORCID works -- that's almost exactly what
they are designed to do. ORCID membership is limited to non profit
organizations, the type that publishes academic papers, but the IETF,
internet drafts and RFCs almost certainly are in scope.
But if the problem is "let's design an infrastructure so that an
arbitrary Alice can retrieve Bob's unique key", then that does not work
so well. Redesigning ORCID to handle the general public, would require a
change of mission, and would probably be rather expensive.
-- Christian Huitema
