Brian Campbell forwarded me this thread following your comments, Michael. I co-chair the Death & The Digital Estate Community Group at the OpenID Foundation. These kinds of issues are exactly what we’re trying to tackle in DADE CG. At the moment, we’re not chartered to work on protocols, so we’re working to understand what a digital estate is, how it can be managed (it turns out the answer is, “it depends”), and how people think about their digital estates. I hope a next step in our evolution is to move on to thinking about protocols for digital estate management.
You can find DADE CG meeting minutes and other data on our Wiki and GitHub repo.
I welcome the IETF community to join us at DADE CG. If it makes sense to share more information about DADE CG with the larger IETF community at IETF123, let me know. I’ll be in attendance in person and I’m happy to speak about DADE CG to get others involved.
-dhs
From: Michael Richardson <mcr+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, Jun 24, 2025, 4:37 PM
Subject: Re: Comments on draft-richardson-in-memoriam-00
To: IETF Discussion Mailing List <ietf@xxxxxxxx>
George Michaelson <ggm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> The is personal information in Internet-Drafts, RFCs and mailing list
>> archives. Nowadays, there is also the datatracker profile. There
>> isn't any procedure which explains what to do if the person is no
>> longer active. I suggest finding out whether there is any interest in
>> assigning a "legacy contact". The intent is so that a family do not
>> have to jump through hops to request a change to the profile.
> I would support simpler changes which achieved this outcome and reduced
> burdens on families in a difficult time. But, I emphasise my preference
> for simple, light touch.
Related to dealing with deceased relatives, there is probably a need for a
standard form of machine readable power-of-attorney/death certificate, along
with a way for people to indicate some of "legacy contact" in advance.
This probably should/would get built by others on top of SPICE.
But, maybe it's actually a useful example/reference problem for someone to
tackle, and for the IETF to among the first users.
I have at least three deceased relatives (one who made it to 100!) who still
have "active" accounts on facebook, and I keep trying to get their next of
kin (all uncles) to go through the process to memorialize their accounts.
(End of life senility can be almost harder to deal with legally than death)
> Given discussions about ORCID and some other issues in gender related
> name issues, there might be a wider matter regarding identity tags in
> documents, Web linkage, archive, and change control. However, i think
> you highlight a good instance of need.
It would be cool if ORCID did this work, and we were to just use it.
--
Michael Richardson <mcr+IETF@xxxxxxxxxxxx> . o O ( IPv6 IøT consulting )
Sandelman Software Works Inc, Ottawa and Worldwide
