Extended vocabulary for CIP/CPS classification and search

[rphair]

@aldo555 thank you for your recent support in building a better UI/UX for cips.cardano.org so that CIP material can be displayed, linked, and searched according to modern standards. CIP editors and contributors were happy to see the pending site preview: https://staging-cip-cardanofoundation.netlify.app

We decided to open a discussion here — rather than the CIPs repository — to include a broad community of people who might use CIPs (not just authors, reviewers, and editors) and also to retain the attention of:

• CF project managers interested in cips.cardano.org
• Architects of the Developer Portal, who now rely on this site to host CIP content (cc @katomm @0xBora)

The most commonly repeated requirement is that we need a way to group CIPs similar in scope and development focus. Though CIP/CPS Category and Status as currently supported on the site preview are very nice to see now (though they need to support multiple selection rather than a single choice), we will also need to support searching on a forthcoming list of "tags" as suggested in these issues & comments:

• Navigation through CIPs is inadequate and blocks usability #53 (comment)
• System Concerns (Cross-Cutting Concerns) Categories in CPS and CIP CIPs#1076

If @aldo555 we could first (p.s. ✅ done) please confirm that you could support adding one or more fields to the CIP front matter (such as Subsystem, as @nhenin had tentatively called System Concerns), we would like to continue discussing what these new field(s) would be called and what their values might be.

The goal would be to add this/these new field(s) as search facets on the developing site in addition to the Category and Status selection lists. NOTE it is even more important in this case that these tag lists accept multiple selections, since

1. CIPs and CPSs themselves will be able to have more than one of these tags, for reasons given in #1076
2. Implementors, architects, release planners, and governance agents will have to pick out CIPs in arbitrary groups when planning hard forks, governance propositions, etc.

We have a scattering of issues on these subjects already, and I will keep linking these back to this discussion until we get through the critical path of establishing that tagging vocabulary. Then

• @aldo555 you could proceed to support it on cips.cardano.org; and
• CIP editors will
  1. update CIP-0001/CIP-9999 to support those new vocabulary keywords & values
  2. work with the community to assign them to merged & in-progress CIPs and CPSs.

cc (those who've made comments about this so far + some multi-node / Blueprint / Network reps whose projects might benefit from this + other CIP editors): @nhenin @ch1bo @KtorZ @Quantumplation @yHSJ @michele-nuzzi @jpraynaud @Ryun1 @Crypto2099 @perturbing

[aldo555]

I can confirm adding new frontmatter fields won't be an issue and won't take much effort to add support for.

[rphair]

This proposal is not getting the 🎉 response that I thought it would... so I've put it on the next CIP meeting agenda https://hackmd.io/@cip-editors/121 (as time permits before our Last Check items) so the other editors can perhaps kickstart it into their own working groups and other developer circles. (cc @Ryun1 @Crypto2099 @perturbing)

I think people have gotten to used to the dry black & white of the CIP repository and that the editors need to paint more of a picture of how energetic and useful a faceted, deep-linkable search could actually be. Perhaps @ch1bo @nhenin you would know of others — with an interest in Blueprint and/or Consensus devs whose work intersects with other areas — who would attend that discussion (here and/or at the meeting) and start contributing to a vocabulary.

[rphair]

@aldo555 & @Ryun1 @Crypto2099 @perturbing - we also have a repeat of the periodic request to make Category: a multiple-select field. As with any proposed extension to the current vocabulary, the application of more than one category would be subject to editorial consensus about whether it's usefully applicable to the CIP.

We have a case here pointed out by @lehins for CIP-0112 being both Plutus (for the realm it affects) and Ledger (for the codebase it would change) and it's not the only one in that position: cardano-foundation/CIPs#749 (comment) (cc @colll78)