IETF role history for datatracker person pages

[toerless]

Description

a) I would like to see that the person pages of datatracker to start tracking/showing historical roles of the person with from/to dates. This should hopefully be possible to do going forward automatically, by tracking the time when a current role was started, and moving it to a past role, when it ends. Detail: When roles end, i would suggest to freeze the email address associated with it, and show this email address not as a hot link.

b) To make this feature useful for the past, it would be nice if persons could also enter past roles by themselves, and these entries would should up in the same format as those auto-generated, going forward, just with some easy distinction shown that it is self-entered.

Reasons:

1. This would IMHO help a lot collaboration in the IETF by trying educate one self about other people in the IETF.

2. It also will help IETF participants who invest a lot of their time in the IETF to have a showing of their work.

3. It would help NomCom

Self-entering this information purely into the biography block would never I) provide the same nice layout and consistency, II) would never be IETF validated, such as a).

If necessary (i hope not), people could be given the option to opt-out of a).

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the IETF's Code of Conduct

[haoyusong]

Good idea and support it.

[dhruvdhody]

+1

I hope we can scrape this from the history maintained in the datatracker

[chris-box]

As a relative newcomer, I would find this really helpful in learning about the background of people I interact with. If you've been in the IETF for 20 years you may know much of this already, but without that experience it is harder to understand context.

[rjsparks]

This is not a new thought, and while I agree the feature would be good to have, it will not be easy to build.

The way the datatracker captures role information is good for telling who is in a role now. It is not good for telling when a person left a role, and is very bad at representing when a person enters and leaves a role multiple time (such as being an AD sometime in the 2000s and then again sometime in the 2010s).

It will take a model change, and a nontrivial amount of manual data backfill, and for very old roles, the information may not be available at all.

See also #3280 and #3526.

[toerless]

Thanks, Robert.

How about starting with the option where the person her/himself can enter the data to be shown in the same format at current roles to get such a past-role section started, e.g.: just a tabular IETF role section after the biography or the like. And just be prepared for future automatic or authenticated generation of such role lines by having some good visual cue that these lines are just self-claimed and not authenticated/verified.

This should hopefully be limited amount of GUI work.

The amount of self entering of such data could then be a good indication of the usefulness/desire of the community to have this information, and once this hits critical mass, then one can think of building the automatic/authenticated entering of those lines.

Beside that: Technically, a change log of the page should provide the necessary information going forward. So worst case, an implementation could be to simply poll the generated page once a month, compare with last-months saved paged and append a diff to the change log. I know, polling is evil. Nobody does it on the Internet or even in IETF protocols ;-)

[nicorusti]

+1
Being a relatively newcomer, this feature would be extremely helpful!

[JayDaley]

I see no reason to allow an opt-out. This is public organizational data.

[marcblanchet]

I've been one who wanted and requested that feature. Anyway we can upgrade the priority of this?

(I can try to contribute code but a) I hate so much python that I never took the time to properly master it b) would probably need a lot of internals guidance so disturbing precious team members time).

Moreover, if code is done, I can certainly volunteer to properly reenter information manually from whatever logs/files we may have.