Has anybody considered the problem of electronic lab books? Many TWiki users use TWiki for note taking during R&D, and a way of signing off this work would be invaluable. The standard procedure at the moment seems to be "print off the TWiki page and glue (yes, really, glue) it in to your lab book, then get your mate to sign and date it".

There are projects around that seem to be addressing the problem (e.g. http://www.combechem.org/), but there's really surprisingly little info on the web. The general idea seems to be that you cryptographically sign the book (e.g. using a PGP key), and then a witness signs the signed version.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a plugin? Something that gave you a "sign this page" button, that created and encrypted version of the page and queued it for signing by someone else.

Of course I imagine the problem is getting the courts to understand that time-stamped 1024 bit encrypted electronic files are somewhat harder to forge than a handwritten scrawl......

-- CrawfordCurrie - 22 Dec 2003

i think this is similar to the needs we will have to authorise verisons of QA documents

-- SvenDowideit - 25 Dec 2003