Policy comments

From Scratchpad

A policy comment would allow an organization that failed to implement a policy to explain its position towards the policy.

Policy comments could have the same structure as derived policies and could appear as implemented policies but would be distinguished by an attribute that would declare the policy as "not implemented". The body text of the document could then explain why the policy was not implemented.

This approach would allow policy makers and policy implementors to refuse policies by extending or implementing a policy comment declaring the refusal to implement a certain policy.

A policy maker could also be given the opportunity to specify an alternative policy, as a replacement for the policy that has been refused. This would allow to gather automatically what policies were offered instead of a specific policy.

The same mechanism(s) as for the exclusion of policies could be used to exclude policy comments, so a user of a search engine would not be forced to discover the same policy comment several times.

Rationale: The usual way of not implementing a policy would be just to ignore it but in some cases the potential implementors might be interested to implement a frequently requested policy but might also be reluctant to implement a policy with unacceptable deficiencies. The potential implementors would then lack a communication channel to communicate their disapproval (assuming the publisher of the policy was not willing to respond to their wishes).