What's the most helpful thing workspot can do?
The people we want to help the most are people who cannot, or will not, own a computer. That's actually a majority of computer users, and a growing percentage, and yet the computing services available to them are rather limited & fragmented.
So the first mission is to create a free package, a distribution, of workspot's system, for use in community centers. Or anyplace with a one site, one room datacenter/Internet access lab.
Say you run a community center. You have an Internet connection, and a bunch of hand-me-down machines. First you put a self-configuring Linux installation CD into each of your machines. Then you put a special CD into each of the special-purpose machines:
The workstations are what the people actually use in the Internet cafe. They have an account and using the Linux Terminal Server Project they share the resources at the community center. Using workspot they have web services & extranet services (all based on GPL packages) so they can both continue their work from anywhere, and broadcast to/interact with the outside world.
Essentially, the workspot distro is a modern version of a time-sharing system. In various forms, we think this is a wave of the future. It isn't clear that the personal-computer-ownership economy is quite working. Ever-bloating software on your personal computer eventually (sometimes rather soon) makes your machine obsolete or unusable. Unreliable software & hardware means you have to be a computer technician to reliably backup your work & data. And it is impossible to completely protect yourself from viruses. Really, experts need to do this work -- but only corporations can afford the software & personnel for a lightweight, well-maintained datacenter.
So, we want to provide a free datacenter package. A free network Computing package. Because we don't believe that large autocratic corporations should be the only ones with access to reliable computing!