If we were to look at Earth as a developing organism from some very far away place, we would observe with great excitement and interest the current phase. It is as if Earth is developing a nervous system since the communications systems have gone digital, are becoming ubiquitous and mobile, and moving from sporadically connected to permanently online.

In this workshop we will be examining the nature of the networks that have emerged to form the substrate of the recent explosion of connectivity, and look at where they are going. We will explore the processes underlying the evolving protocols and the conceptual foundations of the relentless accelerating march towards achieving connectivity. An overview of the various facets of today's internet will be set against a backdrop of the purposes for which they were initially concieved compared to the roles that they currently play.

Special attention will be paid to the basic problems inherent in distributed systems in general and the various strategies we are developing to overcome them, as well as issues such as the free source movement versus proprietary technologies, and the challenge of establishing extensible standards which attempt to anticipate the needs of the future.