THE INTERMED NETWORK,
Developing a cooperative network for the 
information society in the EuroMediterranean context. _______________________________________

L.Navarro. - UPC. Associate Professor
Technical Director of Pangea, a local APC node. leandro@ac.upc.es

G.Rodriguez - UPC. Researcher.
Aleph designer
gerard@ac.upc.es

A.Serra - UPC. Anthropologist. Ph.D.
Co-ordinator of Catalan Chapter of ISOC
artur @ac.upc.es

Contact Point: Artur Serra.
Tel: +34-3-4017182
fax.+34-3-4017055
_________________________________________________________________________ Key words: Information Society, Internet, International Cooperation in the Mediterranean,
Civil Society, Large Scale CSCW system, Aleph technology. ___________________________________________________________________________ 

INTER-MEDITERRANEAN, InterMed, ( http://aleph.pangea.org/intermed) is a co-operative network of projects between research institutions, companies, administrations and civil organisations in order to accelerate the developing of the global information society in this region.We stress the importance of the INTERNET technology as a common language for all this effort. The InterMed key ideas are:
-Information Society
-Internet technology and applications
-North/South , East/West cooperation in the Mediterranean -Civil Society leadership.

InterMed was started with an international conference last January, in Barcelona . Eighty participants, from 12 different Mediterranean countries, from Bosnia to Morocco, from ANP to Israel, as well as representative of international
organisations as the EU, or co-operation networks as the local chapters of ISOC and local nodes of APC are gathering to start up a framework of telematics co-operation in the region.

We considered the Internet technology as the common language to building this cooperation. The richness and the live of the Internet revolution is in his distribution world-wide and an increasing regional diversification. In that sense InterMed network is a regional open electronic space for economic commerce, education projects, civic initiatives, and technological transfer and co-operation. 

Current project on the preliminary stage are: -MEDAgrinet, a project to build a network of agricultural extension services in the Mediterranean,
leaded by Dov Winner from Israel ( dovw@mofet.macam98.ac.il). -MIP, Mediterranean Inventory Project,
an iniciative to establish a Mediterranean Inventory of Information Society related
projects, as part of the G7's Global Inventory Project iniciative. -Finally we are organizing a Mediterranean Academic Network association (MANA), as the CEEnet in the Central and Eastern European countries, an association of the academic networks of the Mediterranean countries. 

Our design is to build an open community in the region based in the federation of IP networks in the region, sharing not only Internet basic protocols or general WWW technology but specific services design for a region which combine enormous economic, social and cultural differences. InterMed tries to be the kernel of this open electronic space, an space of cooperation for a culture of change and openess. 

Technologically, our current project system is based in a federation of Web servers doing as a Network Information Centres for the region, based in Aleph a federated search engine that allows to introduce and get information about the state of Web pages, users, projects,etc. concerning our region. Finally a set of several mailing lists allows to share information and projects.
The Aleph technology was developped in the EU ESPRIT COMIC project on CSCW (1992-1995) (Navarro,L, Rodriguez,G 1995, Serra, A.1995)