The Official Date Files

FROM: Stein von Reusch

What NEED does this meet?
Everybody wants to contribute to the world of science, I guess, if they can. Not everybody has all the credentials, contacts, energies and so on available to go through the entire process of getting something formally published in a paperbased scientific journal, or even an electronic scientific journal. They may hesitate to put it out on their own website in an electronic format for one BIG reason: that they have no obvious way of providing an official date to their document; they may write the date themselves but this is hardly official as it may be just made up. We need to give electronic publication an official status which includes an official date approach.

What is the APPROACH?
The plan is radically simple, and radically efficient: Offer the possibility of anyone anywhere to freely register themselves with full name and other contact information, alongside an electronic publically readable file. They can themselves describe the content of this file in terms of keywords and a descriptive heading. They may even be granted the possibility of keeping the file at least temporarily secret. The file will be stored in a vast archieve that is also backed up on permanent media reguarly, with a date provided by the server; this date cannot be changed by anyone, although the file perhaps can be marked for deletion.

This is distinctive in that anyone may provide any type of file and get an official "backup", which can be searched by others, without having to do it in the context of, say, exchange of programs or whatever; it is distinctive from, let's say, the eminent SourceForge.Net, in that the date cannot be set nor changed by the user. It should also be incredibly simple to use.

I say that it is 'distinctive' in these senses because I have not heard of this solution as yet, but if it exists already, please tell me; I have much use for it myself also...

What are the BENEFITS to people?
We would get an even freer world in that electronic website (even home website) publication can get a far more official status; we would get a sense of permance to the electronic world at those spots which we deliberately seek it (rather than merely taking an overall 'backup of Internet', which seems to be of somewhat dubvious value to my mind...). We will elevate that nature friendly and rather anarchistic approach of exchanging documents without chopping trees for paper, into something that can have a value in terms of providing references when one is doing research; if Mrs Smith, Arizona, solves David Hilbert's last unsolved mathematical problems and publishes it on MrsSmithArizona.com, she can simultaneously supply this document to FreeDateStamping.Com or whatever it is called, and make a link to this place so as to tell the world: "I did this, and I did it just at the date that I say I did it; and so perhaps I'll get credit for this in some decade, meanwhile I'll go on tending to my other activities."

The benefits of this may be to enhance what is really good about the Internet so that many aspects of the hierarchical dense structure of the academic world of publishing may have a healthy competition from a great diversity of fantastically creative individuals who has less official credentials than needed to get the works properly through the old systems. It may in fact contribute to changing the world and our societies just a little bit, if not even more...

What is the COMPETITION?
I'd love to hear of similar services; the closest thing to my mind is SourceForge.Net but you need to be a programmer (like I am, fortunately) to put files to this network and you can change the date yourself; and it is not something that you really should use for other publications than those involve software.

When we make the Official Date Stamp Archieves, or whatever we call them -- The Internet Free and Open Electronic Publishing Archieve -- we must have a certain sense of integrity to the organisation or assocation or network running it; so that the programmers so to speak control each other so that they do not change anything behind the scenes. Ideally, a state committee or something should overlook it; perhaps even a United Nations office or something; and the making of permanent backups would help enhance the security aspect of it.

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
It will be no more expensive than running an archieve like CPAN.ORG or SOURCEFORGE.NET, in fact less expensive because there is no obligation to provide additional facilities; perhaps a search engine at most. The file type can be any of a number of preselected standard alternatives, like Adobe Acrobat and even Ascii .txt. It may get so widely popular that a great deal of servers will have to be set up and so sponsoring in form of hardware should be acquired from a big hardware vendor; the computer software companies, like Sun Microsystems, might want to give money; this can also be the case for Open Society Foundation by George Soros. The most expensive part will be the official security element -- that the programmers are indeed having full integrity in running these servers. There is no difficult apart from just getting together and doing it. The programming takes nothing more than a week; setting up all the servers in terms of physical space and so on is the thing that together with providing organsational facilities for overlooking it what takes most time and therefore also budget money.

I'd say $100.000 would get it beautifully started, and then there will be a portion of this money devoted to getting time and resources to contact a large number of big organisations and companies to get sustainable funding. But experiments of this nature could be made, of course, without hardly any funding. The fun is if it is official, though, not just nearly official!