Roger Hicks wrote: > An automated web-page can easily track transfers of property and >property ownership taking 90% of the hassle out of it. An audit record can >be maintained by sending e-mail notification of all transactions to the >mailing list,
Be careful there. If transfers and other transactions are submitted by HTTP, then there is no record of what was sent to the bot. There's at most a record of what the bot perceived. Don't mix these up. A great advantage of business being conducted by email is that any business can be conducted entirely in public. If the bot goes wrong, or is accused of doing so, anyone can reconstruct the state by analysis of the public mail logs. The web fundamentally fails to provide that. (The web is fundamentally poor at write-mode transactions. It's damned convenient for read-only access, but for write it lacks transactional concepts and there's no equivalent to mailing lists.) Otherwise I agree with you. A bot could read mail from the mailing list and track transfers based on that. I'd recommend such a system for any office tracking numerous simple actions. > The rule would >simply need to state that the Secretary must maintain records and historical >information on the list for audit purposes. That's pretty much the situation in the present rules. We also discussed the issues of automation and webbification a few weeks ago, just before you arrived IIRC. You might want to check the logs. -zefram
