I had this idea and was advised to take it to the forums for community input.

I work on the periphery of a project that is using RTC. I see that the team has certain "official tags" that are used as part of the work item management process. (An example is "ddrb-deferred" which means a certain team has reviewed the item and decided it should not get worked on in the current release cycle.)

In this project, the meanings of "official tags" are communicated via e-mail when they're communicated at all. This seems counter to the "collect all team/project knowledge you need" goal of Jazz. If something is communicated via another channel, or if knowledge about the work item process is stored in a project wiki or something, isn't that just an indication that Jazz isn't covering the whole team-development landscape?

I think Jazz would benefit from offering a "glossary of tags" for projects to use. It starts out empty - that is, there are no pre-defined tags with particular meanings. It can be populated as tags gain traction in the project and their meanings evolve.

There should be a link to the glossary from the work item view and other places where tags are used. Entries would give the name of the tag and its meaning within the project. No big ceremony, but it keeps the meanings of (sometimes-cryptic) tags out of the realm of folklore. It also helps prevent the proliferation of overlapping tags, like "readme" and "readme-item," created by different people because neither knew the other existed.

Not all tags need to have meanings or need to be defined in the glossary. I do not propose limiting the use of tags to those which appear there. Tags can still be created easily and used informally. But when a project decides a tag has a certain meaning, it would be nice to have a permanent, discoverable place to record that.

Any support for this? Any precedent, pro or con?