As far as I know, this mailing list represents the best collection of people knowledgeable about time zones and summer time regulations all over the world. There would be many advantages if we could present ourself as a more formal entity to the governments of this world. We could establish something called for instance a "International Timezone Information Center". We could send letters directly or over UN channels to the governments. In these letters, we could invite the government employees responsible for the various national time zones to join our mailing list and we could ask the governments to inform us about any future time zone changes as early as possible. We could also provide for governments information material about the summer time switching algorithms that are currently in use. Such a periodic mailing could be easily created automatically from the most recent tz database. Such a publication would have several effects: - Governments have a chance to check the Olson database contents periodicly (both algorithms and terminology) - Governments are reminded periodicly to inform us whenever they plan to change their time zones - We would get in better contact with other organizations that collect timezone information (CIA, phone companies, etc.) - Governments are made a little bit more aware about the headaches that frequent arbitrary time zone changes and incompatible summer time switching rules can cause in the technical world - We would not have to rely completely on unprecise media reports about planned timezone changes but would get access to more official reports - Governments would get well-engineered examples of how a summer time switching rule should be specified correctly - Governments could perhaps be persuaded to accept a unique ID for their national time zones (I have already seen some good proposals here) All we need is someone who would be willing to operate such a "International Timezone Information Center (ITIC?)", preferably someone working for a big organization or company that is very interested in keeping information about time zones up to date. Perhaps several such organizations (AT&T, Sun, Microsoft, etc.) would be willing to support a time zone information center. The Information Center should under no circumstances be financed by selling the resulting publications. The data should be freely usable, in order to avoid the silly situation that we have with ISO standards (not online and so expensive that almost nobody ever sees a copy them). May be, we could later give this operation a more official touch by writing an ISO standard or an ITU-R TF-series recommendation <URL:http://www.itu.ch/itudoc/itu-r/rec/tf.html> that describes the role of the ITIC (ugly acronym, better suggestions?). We could also establish some more or less formal relations with the UN and the BIH/IERS (Bureau International d'Heure/International Earth Rotation Service, the folks that define UTC as defined by ITU-R). What do you think? Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Science grad student, Purdue University, Indiana, USA -- email: kuhn@cs.purdue.edu