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Without getting into too much detail, The Digital Society Group is constructing a pure-technology infrastructure to provide for the operation, governance and existence of a complete digital society within a free enterprise zone. The web site doesn't explain what methods you are using to establish these zones. Do you have a mailing list set up for discussion? The plan sounds interesting and ideologically supportable, but I'm skeptical.

Blanc, I'm trying to get more docs online ASAP to explain things. The physical free zones are very popular in the interational business world, but I as a computer type had never heard of them other than Hong Kong, etc. When a country wants to set up a free zone, they come to Openworld and its partner companies who do everything from clearing land, construction, setting up businesses, schools, hospitals, etc. One of the soon to be required components of a free zone installation is a digital infrastructure to link all of the things together. We're talking smart cards for physical structure security and personal ID, email, web hosting, net access, all kinds of stuff. Since we are building a "country" from scratch, rather than have to automate paper workflows and do document management, the governance processes are designed to be digital from the start. Thus, to provide incorporation services to its citizens, a free zone allows them to sign up via web browser, and the daily maintenance, processing and management of the corporate records is also done almost exclusively via web browser and email. Its fast, cheap, and requires far less labor than a paper-based system. Another feature is that rather than maintaining the records for the customer, the customer can log in via web browser and update their own corporate record. (similar to Internic) This reduces labor even further and reduces the cost of incorporation to around $100 per year making instant offshore incorporation accessible to the general global public for the first time. That kind of solution applied across an entire governance and communications infrastructure make for some radical things to become possible. Another concept being implemented is that each new free zone (being fully wired) can easily replicate records and data with other free zones (they will actually be required to for certain things) and thus a citizen in one free zone can access banking, etc. services (even physical access) in another. So, we see the emergence of a phsically distributed, digitally cohesive network of "corporate states". This lends to applications like data protection and hiding via distributed storage or data sharing via common dataspaces and replication. The technical methods to perform all of this work are a bit touchy. At the risk of starting endless flame wars, I was looking at Lotus Bloats for its replication and hierarchical security structure as well as easy forms to web publishing and workflow management. That got shot down at the thought of actually administrating the mess and also the costs are fairly significant. The final nail in the coffin was the encryption key escrow fiasco with the Swiss. I was also looking at NT due to the nice database-to-web interface and the fact that IIS 4 isn't too bad. But again software license costs are large and who knows if Microsoft is doing, or will do, a key escrow deal for future products? Who knows what they are doing now with NT on the OS level? You can't run around making structures which allow people around the world to move money and communicate anonymously, incorporate and have software agents be owners of property and bank accounts without someone getting very pissed off. Thus, a good solution seems to be Linux in that its cheap, Unix is good for multi-process routing, and the toolkits and components created by the Digital Society can be easily moved into the public domin in some form or another. Also, the export mess can be gotten around in one way or another. Any comments? Any better alternatives than Linux? The coding being done now is either cross-platform or prototype which will be scrapped as soon as the kinks are worked out and the real fun can begin. The Digital Society is purposefully working cheap and small to enable the tools and communities to be deployed at as close as possible to no cost for the end-user - that is the priority. Most things are being coded from scratch to ensure security and keep the costs low. Labor is cheap - when its your own. :) Jalon --------------------------------------------------------------- Jalon Q. Zimmerman, Director The Digital Society Group A division of Openworld, Inc. http://www.openworld.com/ jalonz@openworld.com --------------------------------------------------------------- The government is not your mommy. ---------------------------------------------------------------