Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) enable new forms of collaboration between companies, governments, suppliers and customers, improving the way they work and the products and services they offer through ad-hoc integration of systems across organisational boundaries.  However, the barriers to this vision are not all technological.  Lack of trust is seen as a major obstacle to online business today, reflecting unreliability of technology, lack of direct contact with other parties, privacy concerns, identity theft, and many other factors.

The EU-funded TrustCoM Integrated Project (FP6 project # 01945) aims to mitigate this problem and facilitate online business by developing a framework for trust and contract management, enabling secure collaborative business processing in Virtual Organisations.  The framework will provide means of achieving:

• establishment of trust relationships,
• autonomic security,
• formation, verification, negotiation and amendment of electronic contracts
• assessment of the execution of contracts, and enforcement of trust and security policies

Systems and software engineering tools and methods will be developed to support the design, implementation and operation of systems using the framework. The project will also study and develop socio-economic models for online business, and analyse legal and regulatory issues related to contracts and collaborative work across organisational and national borders.

The project team consists of 15 partners from 8 European countries, ranging from industry to research institutions and academia, with expertise in areas such as ICT, economy, business processes, trust, policies, contracts and law.  The project will run from February 2004 to January 2007.