Creating an Advanced Collaborative Open Resource Network

Carnegie Mellon, in collaboration with several other universities and companies, is beginning to develop ACORN, an Advanced Collaborative Open Resource Network. ACORN will provide the infrastructure to create an electronic community which will be able to design and sell engineered products in competitive markets as well as conduct research and development by collaborating through a network. Creating such a community is a task of national proportions and cannot be accomplished by our group alone since the target community encompasses the entire country. We have an unprecedented opportunity to create and experiment with an electronic community which can serve as the model for a larger national community. In this paper, we outline the architecture for an information infrastructure to create and sustain such a community. This paper is not a standard research paper; it is being published to invite the members of the community to participate in the evolution of the ideas expressed here and to encourage the shared development of the infrastructure necessary to create this network.