Re: National summit planned for online economy

David Chia (rsedc@urgento.gse.rmit.EDU.AU)
Thu, 16 Oct 1997 14:55:09 +1000 (EST)

Tom Worthington wrote:
>
> 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.
>

The Melbourne UN conference is organized by United Nation Trade Point
Development Center (UNTPDC). The operation of UNTPDC is headed by an UN
official and it is currently hosted in RMIT University. We mostly work
in the international arena at high government level, our main target
nations are the least developed countries and developing countries, but
not excluding the developed countries. Two years ago we have
communicated with Aus DAS but that came to nothing. Last year our
'branch' research operation in US was launched by the Governor of
Minnesota.

We organized an UN electronic commerce conference at Bangkok in May
this year where we received the mandate to conduct a feasibility study
on setting up a global certification infrastructure overseen by
UNTPDC. We have close working relationships with many other
governments. I have just completed an assignment with the Turkey Prime
Ministry Undersecretariat for Foreign Trade regarding the
implementation of their country's certification infrastructure under
the UNTPDC's framework.

The role of UNTPDC is to facilitate and to encourage the use of
international standards in global electronic commerce.
The Melbourne comference provides the opportunity for our strategic
research associates to demonstrate their electronic commerce solutions
to the world. Our relationships with the research associates are at
the head-office level where-ever that might be. We have at least two
or more large global corporations as research associates in each areas
of hardware, software, communication, smart-card, etc.

Our next international conference will be at Dubai, Feb 1998.

Dr. David Chia,
RMIT University.