National summit planned for online economy

[Tom Worthington]

At 12:06 PM 15/10/97 +0930, Glen Turner wrote:

>Tom Worthington wrote:
>
>> ...Was wondering myself. First I knew of it was when I got an
>> invitation on 24 September.
>
>The UN actually has a long, and successful, history of
>establishing international standards...
>
>The UN is currently developing a Model Law on Electronic
>Commerce that may be of some interest...

I wasn't suggesting that the UN effort was not worthwhile, but that this
conference appeared from nowhere. I hadn't heard of UN work until the
invitation to the conference arrived.

If the UN had a big on-line effort on electronic commerce underway for
years, then I would have expected to hear about it before now. It may be of
course that the same "bottom up" approach is being followed, as adopted by
Senator Alston for e-commerce, and as I described in "Internet in
Government": http://www.acslink.net.au/~tomw/auugpa.htm 

With this approach the workers test the practice, then write the policy and
then the politicians launch it as their "new initiative" retrospectively.


Tom Worthington                         E-mail: tomw@acslink.net.au
President, Australian Computer Society  http://www.acslink.net.au/~tomw
GPO Box 446, Canberra ACT 2601          Fax: 0419 499422
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ACS on Information Ministry: http://www.acs.org.au/news/alston.htm