Tim May recently made some comments that it might be a good idea to avoid having any physical meetings of cypherpunks for the near future, given the Jim Bell circumstance. This ties in with a project that I am currently undertaking, and I thought I would solicit assistance from the cypherpunks at large. Those of you familiar with the mechanisms of the net may be familiar with the concept of MUSHes (a variant of the Multi User Domain or MUD). While email/lists are a wonderful asynchronous communication tool, the value of an interactive medium which provides real-time discussion is a piece of the overall communication spectrum that has been overlooked (mostly). New efforts to move audio or video are interesting, but the net bandwidth needed is extreme at this stage, and frankly 'a word is worth a thousand pictures.' Myself and a friend would like to initiate a MUSH oriented around creating a virtual meeting place for virtual organizations, such as the cypherpunks. Chat systems like IRC don't provide a context, or some of the nifty features you can build into a MUSH. We can provide the coding muscle (although help is always welcome--MUSHcode is a bastard variant similar to C or PASCAL, with some LISPy list processing), but we need a host to provide us with a machine. If you might be interested, drop me a line, I can feed you the MUSH requirements (light--~20M disk space, and light processing, since you're just moving text). A MUSH for a virtual organization will provide benefits: -- an 'avatar' address in the net where people can leave you mail or connect for an interactive discussion; -- a virtual space, like an office, for people who want one; -- meeting rooms, with logging available; -- simulations; -- briefings, so for instance, a newbie to cypherpunks could be told the address and they could log in to receive a canned (but still more interactive) discussion of cypherpunk issues and technology, as well as the option to talk with other c'punks; -- clients for MUSHes are freely available (including window and shell variants), and we could also hack together a secure client; this will also be a good time to work out 'anonymous telnet' systems (MUSHes allow admin to see the host of origin, but not username). We would like to begin this project inside the next few weeks, and we could have something reasonably functional inside of a month after that. Incidentally, this is a project we've been working on for some time, just that the need and utility have suddenly become timely. Michael Wilson 5514706@mcimail.com