State In A Box

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Project proposed by Vinay Gupta.


Description

The Concept

" State In A Box (SIAB) is a set of interwoven concepts which relate to the idea of rebuilding the State from the ground up, from scratch, on modern technological infrastructure.

Much of our thinking about the State derives from historical accidents like monarchy, gold and paper ballots. The structures of our democracy rest on foundations built when travel was slow and before the invention of public key cryptography. Taxation rests on a framework which predates credit cards and electronic bank records. Security rests on organizational structures which are still recognizable from Rome or Babylonia.

In the commercial sector, areas which have these kinds of deeply embedded but no longer valid assumptions go through periodic restructuring. These processes of "creative destruction" re-optimize the business processes, frequently by moving the divisions between one business and another through processes like integration and disaggregation.

In government, short of the collapse of nation states, the pace of innovation is much, much slower.

It is my contention that this fact obscures one or possibly two order of magnitude cost and capital savings in providing State services to citizens. The price paid for stability, in this instance, is inefficiency.

However, in countries that do not even have stability, this inefficiency can scarcely be afforded. By thinking about redesigning the structure of the State around modern technology, we may be able to design a robust new technological infrastructure to run a State upon.

This effort is called State In A Box because the likely form factor of a deployable solution is actually about 20 trucks, and State in About Twenty Trucks is somewhat unwieldy." (http://guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php)


The Paper

" State In A Box presents a coherent vision of overhauling the fundamental assumptions made about nation state infrastructure to enable breakthroughs in Security, Stability, Transition and Reconstruction (SSTR) functions in states in crisis. The Identity Services Architecture presented enables low cost, high security financial transaction infrastructure to be rolled out using 2D bar codes, public key cryptography, camera phones and biometrics in a novel configuration which both protects civil liberties and provides strong identity information for legal processes.

Furthermore, an approach to international control of a single international biometric database is presented, based on the chaordic work of Dee Hock, the architect of VISA. The assessment at the heart of this paper is that the benefits of a correctly-designed rights-respecting cross-jurisdictional chaordic governance structure cannot be forgone if we are to see a realistic implementation of biometrics as an enabling technology for development. " (http://guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php)