Our Vision & Mission0

Reasons for Action 1

The way Doug Engelbart perceived it: 1a

  • Our world is a complex place with urgent problems of a global scale.
    • 1a1
  • The rate, scale, and complex nature of change is unprecedented and beyond the capability of any one person, organization, or even nation to comprehend and respond to.
    • 1a2
  • Challenges of an exponential scale require an evolutionary coping strategy of a commensurate scale at a cooperative cross-disciplinary, international, cross-cultural level.
    • 1a3
  • We need a new, co-evolutionary environment capable of handling simultaneous complex social, technical, and economic changes at an appropriate rate and scale.
    • 1a4
  • The grand challenge is to boost the collective IQ of organizations and of society. A successful effort brings about an improved capacity for addressing any other grand challenge.
    • 1a5
  • The improvements gained and applied in their own pursuit will accelerate the improvement of collective IQ. This is a bootstrapping strategy.
    • 1a6
  • Those organizations, communities, institutions, and nations that successfully bootstrap their collective IQ will achieve the highest levels of performance and success.
    • 1a7

It is essentially these perceptions that have underlain the researches by Engelbart and his team, work that led to many innovations in computing and is now continuing in the development of networked improvement communities (NICs), Bootstrapping Innovation and Collective IQ, and the Dynamic Knowledge Initiative. 1b

Our Mission 2

In accord with the above reasons for action, Doug Engelbart developed throughout a lifetime a sense of mission, which the Doug Engelbart Institute seeks to implement:2a

  • Promote awareness of the scale, urgency, and complexity of the challenges we face.
    • 2a1
  • Catalyze, launch, and shepherd an active, strategic pursuit of boosting the collective IQ on a scale commensurate with the rate, scale, and pervasiveness of change.
    • 2a2
  • Create an exploratory environment where participants can collaborate, experiment, and set in motion advanced pilot outposts* in diverse application areas.
    • 2a3
  • Enable a whole new way of thinking about the way we work, learn, and live together.
    • 2a4
  • Promote development of a collective IQ among, within, and by networked improvement communities.
    • 2a5
  • Cultivate a knowledge environment that includes a shared dynamic knowledge repository (DKR).
    • 2a6
  • Foster development of an open-platform information system infrastructure based on an open hyperdocument systems (OHS) framework.
    • 2a7
  • Share the A-B-C's of bootstrapping* and support co-evolution of human organizations and their tools.
    • 2a8
  • Enable sharing of effort, cost and risks of advanced exploration among a diverse set of organizations and improvement communities.
    • 2a9
  • Push the scaling of bootstrapping toward what could become national improvement infrastructures, as well as a global improvement infrastructure.
    • 2a10

This statement of vision and mission was crafted by DCE, CE, PR, MD, and PY.3

*Re advanced pilot outposts. Strategically placed outposts in time, staffed by people well qualified to get a best possible fix on the futuristic outlook of especial concern to a particular organization or society and thereby ought to provide a superior insight in how the "mother ship" may move ahead. Advanced pilot outposts may be financed by a number of commercial organizations or public bodies with common interests. Universities are seen as suitable locales for such outposts. (^where cited)

*Re A-B-C's of bootstrapping. Any organization's stock in trade is called here an A-activity; its efforts to improve how A gets done is called a B-activity. The bootstrapping strategy serves to improve on B and is called a C-activity. The value of C may be perceived as garnering compound interest on an organization's intellectual capital. One advocate of that perception is Dr. Curtis Carlson, past President and CEO of SRI International, see What is the value proposition? in the Colloquium section. (^where cited)