I would suggest starting with more general tags and observing patterns rather than getting too micro too early thereby risking complication and the addition of unused categories.

My name is Mathew Hoy, Senior Web Designer at The University of Western Ontario. Please consider adding EDU as a topic code for Education. Also consider HIED for Higher Education topics. Thanks.

I suggest ACT for activism as a topic code to encompass protests, rallies, demonstrations, political flashmobs etc. This would be great for rabble.ca as a tool for aggregating those actions at a local level.

I suggest FOOD as a topic code for retaurants, recipes, produce gardening etc.

I would suggest, except in cases where it disambiguates, that the three/four letter code be the first three letters of the word/phrase topic. So, for example MED for MEDIA not MDA WEI for Weird and Offbeat not WRD etc. This will make it easier for folks to both remember and construct topic codes.

Mathew, EDU for Education has been added to the list. HIED being considered.

Wayne, MED was initially considered for MEDIA but was changed to MDA to leave MED open for possible use for MEDICAL. We could still change back to MED for MEDIA. THoughts?

Wayne,

FOOD was added to the list, but does not include restaurant reviews etc. That is covered by the EATS tag.

ACT for Activism has been added.

Good call on MED.

How about emergency situations? That is one of the more interesting aspects of viral social media such as Twitter. #LDN911? Or police activity #LDNCOPS

Do we want to get sport specific? HKY for hockey...SOC for soccer. Team-specific code? LFS for the leafs...TFC for Toronto FC. Also, the example for NEWS is BRK.

Another great suggestion for tags Steve. Will add 911, FIRE, need to think and get more feedbacd on COPS vs POLC.

Hey Maurice thanks for checking in here. Will fix typo 8-) And potentially sport-specifc tags could be added to the convention. A couple of people have suggested in conversation that something like #torspo.hky could be adopted. Still needs more thought and discussion at this point. Early days still. . .

I think there's a big gap in the pregnancy/parenting area. All we have is "kids" for kid-related activities. "Family" doesn't really capture the flavor properly, but FAM is a short tag that might work. I'd suggest PREG for pregnancy, TTC for trying to conceive (unless that conflicts with Toronto Transit Commission), BABY, MOMS, DADS as other short, more descriptive tags.

Like EDU that someone suggested above. Already well established. Need abbreviations for school, daycare/childcare, various school boards (or a naming convention for school boards and individual schools).

I've seen HLTH used for health. Also in that vein: HOSP, MD, RN, MID (midwife), DOU (doula) [I don't think there are internationally recognized abbreviations for midwife or doula]. Need naming conventions for awkward/lengthy names, particularly names that begin with similar first three letters like psychiatrist vs. psychologist.

There are a huge number of Canadian groups, both medical (e.g., CPS, SOGC, CMA, etc.) and otherwise (TWUC, PWAC, CAW, etc.) Do we want to indicate that these groups are Canadian (by incorporating into a Canadian tag)? Or should we just encourage people to tag as CMA, CPS etc.?

The political discussions tend to break into progressive (e.g., TOPPROG) and conservative threads (TCOT) (plus all kinds of other variants) so we may want Canadian political tags to reflect that - either with a combination of tags or a hybrid tag.

Another thought. What about JOBS? People are sharing a lot of job leads these days. Would be a useful tag to have. (I realize we have WORK, but I see this as being job-lead specific.) Could be a subcategory.

How could we specify sub-topics, for example political topic or leaning. For example GREEN POLITICS -- would that be POLGRN? Then we could have POLLIB, POLNDP, and appropriately, POLCON.

Hey Stuart, thanks for the suggestions for the politics sub-topic tags. At this point we haven't looked at topic tags on this level but gathering comments and suggestions like your will be invaluable in considering what level of detail makes sense to define in CanTags. If you have any additional suggestions for other topics please share them.

geo

Picking up on Stuart's comment... There are some things that will have many sub-categories. News is the one that comes immediately to mind, and is already reflected in the "under consideration" list. What joins all of these suggestions together so that looking at the tag makes it immediately apparent that it's a News sub-category? Nothing. So I'd suggest that you consider adopting the practice of using the same topic prefix in those cases. For example:
xxxNWACT
xxxNWBRK
xxxNWEDU
xxxNWFAM
xxxNWGEN
xxxNWGRN
xxxNWMDA
etc.

Propose to add #xxxGAS for local gas prices.

Love that idea, Steve. Could also use it to discuss eating at Taco Bell.

GAS topic code added, for gasoline not Taco Bell.

Waiting for a response to my 2009/05/05 suggestion. Also, Geo, I've got a question. When you say that something is "under consideration," who is it "under consideration" by? Is this going to be democratic?