I want to start/improve a culture of collective code ownership at my company but at a geographically distributed level... I'd say there is some current collective code-ownership mentality, but only at single geographical sites.

This is a follow-up to this question: What is the politically correct way of refactoring other's code?

I'm just wondering if submitting *just code comments* for code reviews (we have ReviewBoard, possibly upgrading to Crucible) could actually be an effective mechanism to get the conversation started on improving code, without having others feel territorial about their code.

For example, if I add:

//ToDo: Refactor this code and that code because of reasons X and Y

Then, submit it for code review, and it gets accepted... it could be considered as an agreement (which I think is sometimes harder to get with new code up front). At the same time, the author (and others) might have an easier time digesting and accepting the proposal; rejecting a proposal because it might break things will not longer be a valid reason and therefore the fear of making a change is lost... and at the same time, do not invest 10 hours optimizing something that no one thinks it is worth it and opposes to it just out of fear.

This is all conjecture, but I'm feeling something like this (submitting refactoring notes in code comments at the code-review process) would work. Has anyone done something like this in practice?, if so, what have been the results?