Engelbart Colloquium at Stanford University

An In Depth Look At "The Unfinished Revolution"

Session 10

March 10, 2000

(ProEd001-Engelbart-1/1)

 

 

Engelbart: …and this is the tenth session and it’s entitled "Tying it all together: Next Steps" and I cut the slide productions into two parts for the first and second part of the session.

<SLIDE> SESSION 10 THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION

Engelbart: This is one in which normally was scheduled ourselves months ago. Laying this out to sort of tie it all together and in the amongst it there was a statement about saying OK, Doug was suppose to tell you how this all happened. And so, I just have to tell you up front I started making a bunch of slides about how it all happened and it just went on and on and on about this idea hit me and then I couldn’t do this and then I realized that etc… and I threw it away. So I’ve got a much shorter way of building into giving you an overview about how we’ve, sort of what we’ve been through in the past and then try on converge on what’s next.

<SLIDE> PLAN FOR THIS FINAL COLLOQUIUM SESSION

Engelbart: Anyway, the sort of why and how did this strategic frame work evolve and that’s crevolve and I said and the recapping the entire colloquium content via what I call a paradigm map and for some years I was giving presentations with this paradigm map and so I’ll slip it in there.. little bit. It sort of emphasizes this belief that I have that prevailing paradigms are such a compellingly important factor and how… how or how are not where society is going to get ready for it’s future. So Anyway, and so… then, if all of this is a… it’s a strategic sort of opening up of a campaign and a sort of here’s how we can approach the future. Well, we’d like to get it started so today we’ll bring up some more of the issues at several different levels about getting it started, going at it like this which includes sort of a general call to action that’s sort of like saying, "well if you want to see it happen, people are going to have to get active in it like this."

<SLIDE> PLAN FOR THIS FINAL COLLOQUIUM SESSION

<SLIDE> LIFETIME GOAL AND A PURSUIT STRATEGY

Engelbart: So then in a general statement in the first half and the second half we’ll get more specific about that. So anyway, this has been essentially a lifetime goal. At least I said at about forty-nine years ago, "any day now." One Saturday forty-nine years ago in the spring I sort of made a commitment and I had made a partial commitment up to that point. But that Saturday when I began to realize that all the other thing I was thinking to try to do got to be more and more complex in the world and trying to save this for that… a crusade in the world. So I wanted… I just broke through and realized that the world is getting very complex and the problems are getting more complex and more urgent and they are issues that have to be dealt with collectively and if our collective ability to deal with complex urgent things isn’t increasing fast enough we’re gonna get swamped. So what could be done about that? So that’s what was said about this career.

<SLIDE> LIFETIME GOAL AND A PURSUIT STRATEGY

Engelbart: So it’s been forty-nine years of underlining looking at it because it became something built in that I just intuitively was certain of that there is a great deal that the world could do about it and that it would be important to do it. Many of the ensuing years when thing would get really oblique you know… I’d be… I had been fired or I had been told that, "yes, you can continue doing this but you have to be reported to this guy over here and there are going to be no raises for you, no reviews, and stay out of trouble." You know, and you say, "why am I going this?" and you go through the thinking about it and say, "every year sooner that the world will get the idea that it really could boot strap it’s way into a much higher level of collective capability. Every year sooner could make an extremely significant difference so, if I quit now it might make how much difference. You know, take two months more or two years longer to do it and that could be a significant factor." So that really has been a lifetime goal and I’d really like to communicate some of it. It’s not an abstract thing that oh boy I sit there and come across this and it’s nice to deliver a paper and then go about my business. This has just been my life and it’s just driven me and this colloquium session has just been extremely… extremely sort of galvanizing but also really challenging because the problem it’s sort of a mystery to me all these years. Why aren’t I getting across? Why doesn’t everybody see it? And I honestly don’t know but I just know that okay someplace there is some magic of marketing or something that would do the job or else paradigms are still not nearly aligned enough. Anyway, the prevailing paradigms out in the world are the World Wide Web and stuff. It’s really moving so maybe it’s close enough now. These issues hit me even back in the fifties about paradigms and scaling so I talk about this thing to people and somebody says, " well, interactive computer use… all I need is at least twenty minutes of turn around time. Anything lower than that, I don’t see how I can use it."

<SLIDE> EXPERIENCE IN LATE 50’s WITH PARADIGMS AND SCALING

Engelbart: And somebody else says, "All you’re talking about is information retrieval." No, no, it’s more than that… or cognitive psychology… no, it’s more than that. So anyway, a very important study I did was on dimensional scaling and so it really brought home something that small changes in an environment usually brings small quantitative effects. Larger changes start producing qualitative effects and many of them are surprising. But large changes really do us like.. oops, really surprising differences because you’re just not oriented for how much everything is interdependent and something change enough and you don’t realize in the way you just view the world that they are interdependent and that thus you’ll start having other changes. So that experience just set me up for really realizing that the paradigm was all important.

<SLIDE> RELEVANT IMPLICATIONS OF RADICAL SCALE CHANGE

Engelbart: So with kind of implication we said, "what if humans were small as a mosquito?" What would you’re relative design characteristic be? Well, you’d just be terribly over structured. And so what if mosquitoes were as large as a human? They would be terribly under structured. They could even stand on their feet. If humans were ten times taller, wider, etc… we went through that one time and realized that you’d be on the floor gasping for breath. If gravity was ten times weaker what would have happened? So if digital technology was smaller, faster, cheaper – by a factor of a hundred, thousand, million, ten million? Okay, that’s the similar kind of thing that going to hit us. That digital technology is coming across and it’s just really going to be so much cheaper and faster on the broader band and so just that alone can just turn our world upside down. Let’s wait and see. So anyway, this control by our paradigms.

<SLIDE> MORE THAN WE RELIZE… WE ARE CONTROLLED BY OUR PARADIGMS

Engelbart: So, in the face of the greatest avalanche of pervasive, and pervasive is important. Pervasive global change ever, ever, ever, faced by human society. That’s the paradigm scale that I see. Nothing of this scale in the qualitative sense since maybe we shifted from hunter-gatherer to agriculture. Made a huge change. But this is going to happen very much faster and big and change. So our paradigm-limited perspectives dangerously fail to recognize the consequent range and depth of either the threads or the opportunities of mankind. So this is just basic to all these things I’ve been studying in. If there’s someway that we can get people to start looking at that more detailed, I’d love to join groups to actually start working on it and say, " Is that just my intuition, or it is something for real? And Am I once seeing something that it distorted or are the other people not seeing something that is inevitable?

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP "PARADIGM MAP"

Engelbart: So this would be very important. So here’s a paradigm map I made and I used to use it quite a bit. So every one of these boxes around here… and what we’re going to do is just step our way from objective, capability infrastructure… step our way around there clockwise. And each one is a stage of thinking and it sort of involves a shift in some concepts etc. like that and paradigms like that. So this first one is saying, OK the objective… well coping with complexity and urgency collectively and in high performance and then we get to improvement strategy for that. So we say, OK what do we do next? So as we step through this box by box… the box will be having the red border on it and it will appear in the middle of it the sort of a diagram; some of them graphics that you’ve seen before etc. But it sort of shows how they build up. This is in loo of a review in detail this is going through with the thing.

<SLIDE> THE KEY TARGET/CUSTOMER IS THE HUMAN ORGANIZATION

Engelbart: So anyway, the key target customers the human organization for me. So yes, individuals can be augmented considerably but their impact on the world and the value really gets to be how does what they contribute integrate into the collection action that is going on which is the value. So anyway the collection IQ we talked about enough to say well, Engelbart thinks it’s a real, real factor and yes I think that if you put a big envelope around any organization and judged it by the external appearance by what it does like that you could say, " Oh, absent organism that I could judge to see how intelligent it is. How well does it keep track of the outside world and how well does it cope, etc., etc." So it would be just terrific if the world got interested enough in this thing to work up sort of measures and calibrations and say how do we get a rating… so how do we get a rating for, you know team or your school or your corporation or your state or your country. A rating for it to see how well it seems coping in this IQ bliss and like that. I think that would be terrific if sometime we could get measures like that and it really will help everybody see were his organization stands. So anyway, and as with biological organisms evolution happens.

<SLIDE> AND, AS WITH BIOLOGICAL ORGANISMS: EVOLUTION HAPPENS

Engelbart: So spurred on one hand by sudden mutation of radically improved " nervous system" that what the digital stuff is essentially equivalent to and the fact that heavily by environment changes in their ecological niches. Evolution of all other organizations and institutions is simultaneously accelerating so double pressure on an organization. It’s evolving internal capability improvement, while adapting to radically changing environments. So either one of those would be a challenge but when they’re happening simultaneously at rates and complexities we haven’t tasted before, that just means we’re being pressured to tie like that. So an organization's effectiveness depends upon its capability infrastructure.

<SLIDE> AN ORGANIZATION’S EFFECTIVENESS DEPENDS UPON ITS CAPABILITY STRUCTURE

Engelbart: And this is a concert that evolved back in nineteen sixty-one or something for me. Just, oh my god! Yes it is. Bigger capabilities depend on a set of smaller ones etc. And for the emergent large technology change, our paradigms for guiding and applying technology have to be significantly modified.

<SLIDE> AN ORGANIZATION’S EFFECTIVENESS DEPENDS UPON ITS CAPABILITY INFRASTRUCTURE

Engelbart: If you really look at that whole infrastructure capabilities. So here’s the picture that we can start with. So we went through this exercise once before. We just said, "OK, by infrastructure we mean the top up here is a salient capability that you are concerned with is dependant in turn upon aggregate capabilities of lower order capabilities and those in turn of lower order etc. So it’s not hierarchy. I missed called it that for years… Hierarchy, capability hearty, Right in the middle of one of my seminars someone said "It’s not a hierarchy and I looked and said "that’s right, it isn’t." So that sinsidine info structure and then the pervasiveness of changes within it that will be caused fairly directly by these new technologies mean that all kinds of change are going on in the public, multiply affected by older ones. So we said, "ok, is that the picture we want to deal with?" Well, lets see, this is what we actually had in the paradigm map, that the concept of that info structure…

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP "PARADIGM MAP"

Englebart: …in paradigm sort of consideration is very important. This has been for me, very very important. So what’s next? Well we go through some evolution.

<SLIDE> MORE AND MORE CAPIBILITIES, AT ALL LEVELS DEPEND IN TURN ON SUPPORTIVE TECHNOLOGIES

Engelbart: Looking how you look at the capabilities. I said ok, the lot of the world; teckie orientated people say "oh boy all these kinds of technology things can come in and that’s what makes the difference." So he says "yea, that’s right, it really does, that any one of these things, data, retrieving stuff like affects many places in there. So sure enough he says, "if this is changing rapidly look what’s going to happen". Yes, but that is only part of the story. This was the breakthrough for me, you know, forty years ago was saying oh yes, the humans there, and the difference the way human sensory perceptual metal motor activity…

<SLIDE> …AND ALSO DEPEND HEAVILY UPON BASIC HUMAN CAPABILITIES

Engelbart: are also producing, how they work in there, and if it is going to change quite a bit these things have to change. Now you have what some practice so okay. The same basic capabilities are there but you need to start learning more about things. Oh, learning about things? Oh, that means you’ll have to… you’re gonna get new skills and knowledge and training etc. like that if you capability infrastructure’s going to change.

<SLIDE> …WICH DEPEND MORE AND MORE UPON TRAINED SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE

Engelbart: That’s right! That’s right! So okay, this is what? You can go by your technology and somebody will train you And he says, "Okay, great. But is that all?" Well, let’s see. Nope, let’s see. There are a few other things that are going to change concurrently with that.

<SLIDE> "CO-EVOLUTION" IS UNAVAILABLE: SHOULD BE EXPLICITY CULTIVATED!

Engelbart: Many of the procedures by which you do things cause some processes methods language. The very language we are using has been affected already. It’s going to be affected immensely in the future in ways... it’s one of the surprises in my estimation of what’s the lying weight for us all as the kind of change that’s going to come about in language. Fundamentally language is, is a way in which the concepts you hold in your mind gets symbolized. And then, with those symbols it turns out there is a difference in the way you communicate symbols in loo of actually fumbling the grapple with the concepts themselves. And oh, if you get these symbols that you can use externally then you can communicate with people. Oh and then you can put them down on some media and start manipulating them in loo of doing the thinking and processes. Oh, if the computer can help you do that then you can probably start doing different concept manipulation. Oh, also these externalized symbols that you’ve been using like that, grew and evolved in an environments that are very much different than now. So maybe the very symbology we use to represent our concepts can start changing because a computer can lay them out so quickly and much be fine way. Oh hey, maybe we can back down into our machinery inside of our heads and start redoing some of that so that we can take advantage of new ways that the computer can respond to us…

<SLIDE> "CO-EVOLUTION" IS UNAVOIDABLE: SHOULD BE EXPLICITY CUTIVATED!

Engelbart: …since what we’re trying to tell, do, signal to it like that, portray things in all of the senses etc. So we may just find that, you know in twenty years or so that people look back on us now as sort of dark age people that, you know had very crude ways of expressing language, very crude ways of manipulating etc. But anyway the outside of this is not to be more fashionable about how you can do your thinking and working but it’s how much more effective we can be as a society to handle the complex problems we see… we do that. So anyway… So this became sort of this opectuich. All of these things inside here are going to be co-evolving with eruptive changes on the right hand side.

 

<SLIDE> CO-EVOLUTION IS UNAVOIDABLE: SHOULD BE EXPLICITY CULTIVATED!

Engelbart: And it’s just… You know I’ve told this colloquium several times about experience in the seventies when everybody thought about interactive computers automating the office. And that’s what they assumed; that was all the rest of us going to stay the same except you automating what you used to do. Well that paradigm was so entrenched and strong that we just couldn’t in our group, even though we were demonstrating things quite dramatically different which now we get awards for, you see. That in those days the prevailing paradigm was so entrenched that it just without much of a quival, just pushed us right off the research world. And the peer review from all sorts of sources: Universities, research groups, government, etc. just said, "well, obviously you’re in the wrong direction." And for some of the reasons that we’ve talked about before and some of them… My friend who’s much better histrionic to nelson last week said you know, "Wizzy Wig." Well Wizz Wig was a great invention for a way for what you really wanted was to really see better what you’re gonna do when you do high quality printing. But it really limited people by saying, "of course that’s you want to see with a computer interface because what it’s for is to produce paper… print." And you start saying, "No, you can fold it up and get all kinds of views. " So we’re gonna talk about that later in the second half of how somehow we can start more evolution going and it’s optional views etc. But anyway it’s been great. So this picture here just tells so much.

<SLIDE> CO-EVOLUTION IS UNAVOIDABLE: SHOULD BE EXPLICITY CULTIVATED

Engelbart: And its going to pop up a few times again. I’m warning you. This is o surprise to the regulars here that… that keeps coming back to it and you can say, "hey, we’ve seen that before." And what I like to do is get to sit down with people and really bore down in here and say, "let’s just take this thing apart and see what kind of things we find in the details." So anyway, so that was the kind of thing when I called this an augmentation system.

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP "PARADIGM MAP"

Engelbart: Excuse me… So your whole capable infrastructure is available to itself by this kind of tool system and human system and that’s just fundamental. So as a part of the paradigms that was extremely important to set that there.

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP "PARADIGM MAP"

Engelbart: So we go to the next thing and it says, oh we started making some simple ways in which we showed two dimensions. One is the tool system, how sophisticated it is out there, and the other is the human system likewise how sophisticated. And this was a bad representation in the old days and I apologize for it. Later I figured out a bunch of better ways in which societies distributed across there. But in any event, with the world moving fast out here and the technology, you see that opens up all sorts of new opportunities on the human system side and that if just essentially a new territory; we call it the co-evolution frontier. But that was very important to put that down as a paradigm as a co-evolution. And one thing we know from looking at the infrastructure is that it isn’t a simple thing of this thing is evolving by a factor of three, then this thing then has to chance by two and a half. The technology changes in a lots of ways and pervades throughout the infrastructure in many impact ways which changes much in there so that it really isn’t any single dimension to the way in which you can say the human system changes. It’s a multi-dimension way in which those dimensions are co-evolving themselves. So the co-evolution is really on a many dimension field. And so finding your way into the future of that, it’s just a mesh. It’s a hell of a mesh. Anyway, so that. Setting up the paradigms it would just… very import to start getting a feeling of that and if you know, we go ahead with talking with people about improving infrastructures in the like, and we can’t sort of all be looking at this, as sort of much change and sophisticated, interconnected, interoperable changes that are going on in there, then we are talking different languages. And so, the world today… most of the leaders that have to run an organization are just conditioned to be tactile oriented for what’s happening there and how you manage it like that and they don’t seem to be oriented about think about complexity things like that. They’ve been dependant upon other people telling them some simple way to deal with complexity of a design or something. So, it’s just a hard thing to communicate. Assuming you all believe like I do, then what would you do to go out there and try and get the rest of the world more oriented about this kind of co-evolution.

<SLIDE> THE WORLD ORGANIZATIONS IN HUMAN-TOOL SPACE

Engelbart: So anyway this is much more of a real kind of a plot that I assumed that you went around the world and you checked on different societies there, they would have a distribution. I would guess something like this. That some of then are quite primitive, but never down to zero human system. Sometime their spiritual etc. qualitative things about the way they relate to people could be superior to what we experience in our world today. But anyway, there’s the distribution of them. And so we’d say that, that well… that probably the people were listening and talking to us feel that they’re ion some organization quite a ways up here. And then the boundary here and the technologies been inching to the right steadily over the decades, centuries but at such a pace that it didn’t really stress everything and open up changes in the human system. Just consider elevators showed up and a… Oh so suddenly you could build multi-story buildings. Oh but how many years did it take before that evolved into those buildings appearing and the changes in urban life considerably about that and things like that. And changes in the way commerce and business was done because people could be grouped so much more and like that so… anyway. But all of that was slow; decades. But today what’s going to happen? Well we say, "This kind of change rate is a disparity between the changes in out external environment and the changes which our organizations can cope with.

<SLIDE> EXPLODING RATE AND CHANGE SCALE

<SLIDE> CO-EVOLUTION FRONTIER: "ADVANCED" VIEW

Engelbart: So it’s much more like this. Isn’t it? That technology’s has moved the tool system way out here. So oh yes boy, the web and e-commerce and everything else like that, wow! It’s just a lot of unexplored territory here. But that’s all right. We know… We’re buying from a vendor who shows us the tools and ways to do it. So we’ve got the path. And he says, " Oh… oh… tell me how that vender knows what path is through there. Oh they’re top of the marketplace." I know, but what they’re clever at is dealing with the market and grabbing market share and doing that, and know whom to deal with in your organization to sell better etc… and are they responsible to you or the other stake holders in the organization. Are they… have any responsibility to the optimum evolution of the organization. Well, not really. But anyway… so these are the things to think about in which I really wish there was more dialogue I could get with people who know of things in the marketplace that try to piece that opt together just to say, "as my instinct about the marketplace isn’t up to it, that what’s necessary for the evolution for moving out into that space right is proactive and user organizations who are in the business themselves of sampling and trying to decide what’s going on… taking responsibility instead of sitting there and watching everybody else. "Oh well, I mind as well do this." So… that’s one of the paradigm issues about this thing is who’s going to take responsibility? So now just things to think about is a little thing called nano-technology which we had speeches on, talks on, and a… I believe firmly is just, is going to explode. And so it’s inevitable a consider.

<SLIDE> RATE AND SCALE OF CHANGE – MORE THOUGTS ABOUT IT:

Engelbart: For instance, you’ll be able to hold your hand in the way of speed and power and storage as much as now exist in the whole world. So I was told this by Eric Drexler a couple years ago that that’s one way to measure… say what likely to happen. And I believe it. I did enough scaling studies and things like that. There’s just no reason in the world why that isn’t going to happen. And so as it does, what’s that going to do to everything you look around? So that you can implant a personal computers. I used to kid people about that thirty years ago. I just loved it.

<SLIDE> RATE AND SCALE OF CHANGE – MORE THOUGHTS ABOUT IT:

Engelbart: And intelligent agents, which you can utilize. Okay you have at your control, a bunch of slaves that maybe aren’t as smart as you but they’re trained and they’ll respond. So what does it take in your part to learn how to make use of a whole fleet of smart agents, smart slaves. And then of course the other side of that is, hey they’re continue to going get smarter. Oh how come, how soon are they going to gang up on up and say how needs the humans? They’d run a much more efficient role without us. So that’s one of the real issues. So anyway those brought me the feeling like, this is more of the picture about what we have to be within…

<SLIDE> CO-EVOLUTION FRONTIER PROBABLE VIEW

Engelbart: If you consider the time constant for an organization to move in this space and you consider that this is probably something like the space we ought to think about whether it’s… this is five years off or ten years off. It doesn’t make much difference because it… you know, we’ve got to plan for what’s gonna be in ten years because we’re not gonna build up much momentum and learn much how to move in this space otherwise. So this just becomes the picture. So it’s, again it’s a paradigm issue. It’s like, you know how much would you bet on. There’s a lot of out future people are just implicitly betting on what that’s going to be like because we’re sort of passively going along with the preventing paradigm which is all things are little different. We have to change. E-Commerce are going to make a difference and etc. But what about the school system, the education system that way and there are so many problems tat are rising due to this. Excuse me. So anyway this is just a very big, very big paradigm issue here. So anyway, about that lifetime thing. So that’s my goal, to you know, as much as possible to see if we can boost mankind’s collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.

<SLIDE> LIFETIME GOAL AND A PURSUIT STRATEGY

Engelbart: So then you make the observation. Oh purposeful pursuit of item one is itself a complex, urgent problem. Oh, oh yeah. So that started some real thinking back there. So one of the things it does is lead you to say "okay, if we’re gonna really complex and urgent we’re gonna have to invest in… in that significantly.

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP "PARADIGM MAP"

Engelbart: So it’s a complicated sort of thing and if normally our investment produce stepwise functional changes in our capability. And if we thought just like any other investor would think, is there some strategy I could use where I get compounded returns on there. So the world is full of business people that are just at that totally and say that’s what runs the world. And yet, you try and talk to them about, hey there’s a strategy for how you go about changing the way you organizations work that could actually get that blue strapping. Oh, Oh, well, all right, they, I mean. So one of the things I like is, hey if any of you’ve got some idea or anything about this, come help us sort of make a picture and try to communicate to the world. And either that or communicate to Doug Engelbart that he’s just way off, which could happen. So anyway… So this brings us a strategic question. What would yield that compounded return on investment? So it’s just a question so… We ought to have business people oriented, business people flocking around to say, " Hey, what would?" Well the first place I think investing and improving their own capability and their organization. They’ll do it on things about efficiency and the product line or cost savings etc. like that. But we’re talking here about the collective smarts but we’re also talking about improving their improvement infrastructures. So that’s something that it doesn’t fit the vocabulary very well yet. So we come around to this thing before and we say, " Oh once before we came back on this diagram and said, "If you organization has a capability…

<SLIDE> HARNESSING EXPLOSIVE TECHNOLOGY DEPENDS TO A NEW DEGREE, ON THE "CAPABILITY- IMPROVEMENT CAPABILITY"

Engelbart: I mean picturing the capability infrastructure which organization has and depends upon and what level and how prominent does the capability for improving your organization. And he says, "Oh well ah… we have a human factors person that’s had a degree in management, something or rather." Oh I see. And we go to these lectures every once and a while about something and I see. And we’ve got consultants out there that are telling us the latest thing. I see. Okay, but… but what is really the infrastructure? What’s the processes? You know how do know how much you budget for? Oh well… and so, this is another paradigm thing that if organizations don’t get sort of explicit about their improvement process and actually know how much they’re spending on etc. Then it just doesn’t seem to be any chance at all that they’re going to be able to cope with the changes in the world. So anyway… So we came across ten years or so, this kind of a picture that we talked about quite often in here.

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP "PARADIGM MAP"

Engelbart: We said if you divide the activities and your organization into at least three categories and you say activity A is that which does it’s everyday business and uses it’s everyday knowledge etc. that’s important. But then you say, if your any activity at all somebody wearing a hat for a half an hour a week or somebody assigned to it as a head of a committee or whatever, is there to improve the capability to do your everyday work then, let’s categorize that activity as B. And then let’s just make an assumption that as that frontier is exploding out there, that we’re going to have to learn more and more about how to figure out were to go which is a B job. And how to get there, which is a B job. And so, you got to raise the capability level of the B activity. So that’s another level of capability. So it turned out that this was sort of like a doodling thing and then to begin to fall into place as a very useful way to think about.

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP "PARADIGM MAP"

Engelbart: So you say, "Okay, this improve… this is the picture of an improvement infrastructure element within you organization and it has pieces of it that flow out all through there." And when I… when I became forced out into the commercial world and then into the industrial world, I wasn’t a very good fit but I learned a lot and one of the thing I began to observe is, every time there was something relatively significant that was going to be changed, the manufacturing or even sales or marketing or you know, planning… they’d have a committee from around inside the corporation. And these were guys who all report to the same boss until they got way up there who was involved with it. It was really like a community. So I got to thinking about how prevalent is the idea of a community. And within big organizations that’s all from part of the improvement. So I wrote a big paper in the eighties about mission and disapline oriented communities and saying they’re important. Mission oriented one is like the people that belong to a professional society who all have the same mission of curing cancer or something and I mean discipline oriented, that’s it. And a mission oriented one is all the people involved in a you know, focused project. And they often come from different parts of organizations etc. to do that. So then I said, "okay, they all work in a distributed knowledge workshop." So I start… coined using the term for a communities knowledge workshop. And then I says, "Oh what we want to deal with is an augmented knowledge workshop." So I started using that term quite a bit, which is really effective on. It fits into this picture very well to think about okay. So that’s what’s going to go through a revolution is this augmented knowledge workshop that we work in individually and then there is communities. You work in one community, you’re sort of in one workshop. Another one like this. Excuse me. I could... I could probably say I got so excited, I forget to breathe. This power of having an audience just out politeness has to sit there… great. So anyway as a paradigm map is evolving in this sense at a… is pretty good. So I says, so how about this investment criteria strategy? Oh then that leads to this, this a bootstrap strategy. So yeah, add one other thing to the one we talked about before.

<SLIDE> LIFETIME GOAL, AND A PURSUIT STRATEGY

Engelbart: We observed that… that goal one is a complex pursuit. And you say, "okay, but if you make headway in goal one since it itself is a complex urgent problem then, if you make headway in being able to improve our capability collectively to deal with complex urgent problems, we ought to be able to deal better with the complex urgent problem of pursuing complex urgent problems. So this three says alright, we apply that capability in our pursuit of that and anybody that… that does any kind of dynamic assessment or something and looks at feedback and compound interest or something says yeah sure, of course. But okay, then that’s the kind of thing that evolved out of this thing. So just looking at that and says, "bootstrap strategy."

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP "PARADIGM MAP"

Engelbart: Then you says, "Okay, if any of these groups is producing something for the next higher one that it can use itself; feed it back. And some of the B things that produce a new capabilities to use an A, boy it’d sodafet it didn’t use it itself or if maybe feed it back down so C could do it etc. like this. So we just say, okay, then its… here’s a picture to take with this thing. Suppose your out source the… help you get for doing your B work. And so the consultant comes in and he says, "Okay, here’s the way we’re going to do it now. Here are the brand new computer tools. You can do it in collaboration and all of this and go on and on. We’ll tell you how to do it." And you start scratching your head and you says, "Well, why don’t you just show us?" And the jaw will drop. And you says, "No I mean your consulting organization must be working this new way so wouldn’t it be a lot easier if we watched how you work?" "Oh uh… you’re…" You see, this is one of the real tests. So in fact it’d be a very interesting way of which if more and more people had gone on to this kind of thing, started asking the people who are so much pushing the technologies out to the world and saying how much you need it and how the value will be and says, "okay, let just see if you think it’s going to be a revolution in there let’s see how you use it to do that." I think that that would make a very significant different in the world if we turned to those big corporations and just said, "Well look, show us inside your work, inside your world. How much difference is it the way you can launch or assess new research things, new production techniques etc. and a… how much are you to deal with outside information of what’s happening in the world that’s relevant to you. Where does it go? How is it used by everybody? Who does the assessing of it and things like that? So show us the dynamics of your knowledge workshop and a… So anyway, when the world gets to the point when they start asking those things and even more advanced when they have a start of measures. You know, the thing that the quality people were telling us when one of our sessions about benchmarking and measuring. Well this would be extremely valuable in the world if we had benchmarking measures for something of the equivalent of what’s the collective I.Q. of your company or of your research group or of your professional society etc. or of your state or of country. So this would be fabulous to get started thinking and comparative stuff. So it would really be a turn around. So maybe all we can do in the world about getting this going is to start pressing for getting measures like this put out and it’d be interesting to see what kind of companies would set up and start changing. Anyway, so then we say okay, the next thing in that bootstrapping strategy the kind of thing that could really feedback best is that which we started talking about there up in the objective.

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP "PARADIGM MAP"

Engelbart: In which we call collective I.Q.

<SLIDE> PEOPLE WORKING TOGETHER

Engelbart: And we says okay, we… Working together we depend on collective knowledge and a… that’s got to be recorded if there are any big groups moving any kind of dynamic complex world and the computer and all that and a… sharing a knowledge and a… the hypermedia etc. is all making a big difference for that and then the questions about how much more difference but… Okay collectively depending on that and we say okay, "Yes, we’ve got this model and the thing we call a dynamic knowledge repository and we sort of keep talking about the three major components of that repository of being these things and…

<SLIDE> COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE IN ACTION

Engelbart: We won’t dig down into those today. We’ve done some of that in the past. But anyway, it’s like saying okay… that how many organizations really fly like that effectively?

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP "PARADIGM MAP"

So he says, "Okay, well just call that representing our collective I.Q. that that’s where it’s going to come from; is people swarming around and operating on this. And we pointed out in the past that maybe each one of these nodes around here is an individual and this is a team. Well great, each one of individual is going to have his or her sort of repository they use two. But there is this common one that’s concurrently evolving along with theirs. Or maybe each one of these things in the circle is a team or a division in a corporation and this is the big corporation. And we know that concurrently they are all changing so… this concurrent currently business up here is just a key kind of aspect of all this. So we have to say, "Yup, we’ve been through this before." And we say, "Yup, we hear concurrently." And that’s the big challenge is that… that… and it leads to the next issue there of a… Well this one way of looking at it collectively.

<SLIDE> CRITICAL FACTOR: "CONCURRENT" EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY’S DKRS

Engelbart: This could be a big corporation and all the little pieces or big conglomerate and all the minor corporations or all the individuals working in a professional society and trying to cure something etc. So that’s… that’s an issue and we’ll look at it later about the kind of scale in which you find that sort of thing going on in the world and a… So the other kind of issue… So we, we coined this sometime last eight, nine years ago.

<SLIDE> CORE CAPABILITIES FOR COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

Engelbart: We coined this term CoDiak. We said… I’d be nice to isolate just a major subset of the capabilities an organization needs to have in order to represent a higher collective I.Q. So we just finally came up that it has to be able to do this well. In concurrently develop integrate and apply knowledge and a… so I… How serviceable this acronym will be. We have to get more dynamics in the world before we find out. So then, then as a… You know, what I threatening to do in this colloquium is… I found a photograph of me milking a cow in a cruddy barn that my family had on a little plot of land and my father died when I was young and we had this acre. In part it was vegetables that we grew and we kept a cow in this little barn and the neighbors let us run the cow and their pasture. And it was my job, because I was the older so to get up morning, night you know, go do the milking. And, alright… So my sister jokester that she was, sneak up there with… I don’t know where she go a flash anyway but… there was a flash of a picture and there is this fourteen year old kid sitting on an upside down bucket with this sort of dirty straw around the floor. It looked all just perfectly normal in those days. And very rusty parts and the cow passively... I think uh… what did we name her? She had a beautiful name, anyway… But looking at that… Looking at that and realizing how far the distance was from there in so many ways. Because sort of a country kid that really was different because even in the depression, very poor we lived happy. We all family get together joke. We didn’t feel deprived we just felt poor and there’s a real difference. But I also felt different. I knew I was different when I went to school. Okay, so I’m different. So it didn’t panic me or put me in anything like that so, I sort of grew up being used to being different and not quite understanding how other people thought and they measured their social life. Like the crowning time was when I was a junior, sitting there looking up and down the rows and a… for the first time looking at all of the shoes and I was the only one with old fashioned, high top, you know farmer shoes. They were my only pair of shoes so that’s alright but… Then I looked at that a second time and I was the only one with comet around his shoes. You know, so… Oh I’m different but you know it could have turned me into something mortified. Oh my god. No, it just… hey you know, those were my only shoes so why should I… But anyway, that picture alone in there sort of tells me all that about that… somehow I grew up… I just wasn’t the same and I didn’t think the same and someone like that and I wasn’t particularly proud of not thinking the same and causing a lot of trouble at times and so fourth and when I went to college I almost flunked out of a state college for the first two quarters because I was trying to learn everything that they said. So I didn’t… I never did really get smart about how to study or take tests or something but I ended up with a four point when I graduated for some reason. I got to graduate school and… So anyway, I just… I just looked out and says, "Well okay, that kid never did get to be like everybody else and it doesn’t really sink in to him that that’s something he should be; the same." Just okay, I’m different and I a… my sense of humor takes over sometimes when it shouldn’t and a… Anyway, so… But that was something about coming out with this very different sort of strategy. It’s sort of part of the same thing. Well it’s sort of what I saw when I started thinking about it and a… it meant so much to me about what the world was that I still keep at it. And a… and I know that a lot of people think this jerky guy… why is he still talking about that? Everybody is doing it already. And he says, "Well I don’t understand that they are. My picture is very different." So anyway, I share these things with you because I don’t just naturally think assume that; look, I won a lot of prizes for things I thought about and did years ago therefor you just have to listen to me because of course I’m right. It’s the same country kids say. Well I don’t know. I just still see it that way and I would really appreciate if I could get more people to at least talk seriously with me. So that’s one way of sort of saying what the hope for outcome of this colloquium can be is that we can somehow raise more participatory activity in which would take be… take… Would take resources for people to start spending time doing this and also some of the things we’d like to build just to show the world. That’s my alarm clock. Anyway, I bet it embarrasses him more than it does me.

Student: Apparently not.

Engelbart: Oh. Anyway so, so I’ll keep on showing you these things and telling you and just because if it sounds strange well you know, it doesn’t really defeat me that itself. But I really wish we could get people to start investing some time and energy and trying to go after this. Because like I say, every year sooner the world will start moving that way. It could make a big difference. And that’s only gonna start moving that way sort of one person at a time for a while. And so that’s the way it goes. So anyway, what I got in McDonald Douglas as one of the products like that, I got some kind of rude awakening and often some rude treatment because I was so naïve. But in amongst of looking at the manufacturing world, what they were doing in it and like that, the number of people started to spend more and more time with me and they showed me interesting things. Like one thing they said, "Well, the system we were calling it augment then really could do a lot of inter-linking with a lot of people." But they said, "Hey, look what happens. We’ve got… There are actually like six thousand companies that are cooperating with the two thousand or so people inside the aerospace firm in the design and manufacture of a fighter aircraft.

<SLIDE>CONCURRENCY AND INTEROPERABILITY

Engelbart: And I understand its thirteen to fifteen thousand companies in a big airliner. A he says okay, they are all a community working together and the kind of communications that needs to go on among them is, is detailed and it’s key important. And when you’re first formulating it you’ve got to co-design with some of these suppliers etc. So specifications have to be laid out and adhered to that you’re contracting to produce this part under these specifications of testing and finishing and all of that. And so, you have to be really clear that you are working to the same specifications that we think you are etc. And you say, "Boy, the way you can interlink all that thoughts would just make the whole thing so much better." And we starting looking into it and figure out ways in which you can do it. It just became so obvious that you’re not going to get the kind of interlinking collaborative sort of tying down coherent knowledge base like that unless there is a basic common open system in which the knowledge containers are meet and address. And so young mean John Bosak has been launching the whole thing about XML which is a great direction on that but in those day, in the eighties nobody heard of that and it would just became so real that we got… We were saying that the business of trying to promote the evolution of an open hyper document system is critical and it’s still something of that sort still is. And I don’t feel that the movement towards the open standards is balanced enough and moving fast enough and can deal with the need of the evolution that we’re talking about. So that becomes a very basic part of the picture of what has to be done in that respect. And so the second period you know, during the next hour and a half that this is something we’re going to be talking about quite a bit and this is… I know that a lot of people have given us feedback that said, you know the tekkie thing is we know the tekkie world there but look at all of the other problems involved with it. So what I want to point out is that in all the level of this infrastructure that exist in there like this, it’s like if you’re gonna build a new multi-level big thing like this, you gotta have the foundation that’s strong enough to take this new structure that’s going to be a lot more integrated with all the levels in it than before. And that foundation to me, it sits right into this business of the marriage of the open hyper document system with the changes in the way we think and work with it. That those have to be something… You’re gonna collaborate with somebody and you put together on a project because you’re both civil engineers or both marketing people or something and you gotta come together with some consistent plan and if you can'’ talk together in this new way, then you’re in trouble. So… So anyway, this global interoperability was just a big, big, big thing and as we said before we went into talk about this open hyper document system.

<SLIDE> REQUIREMENTS FOR OHS – AN OPEN PERDOCUMENT SYSTEM

Engelbart: And a… We’ve done several times written papers about it and some of those papers are available on the web. They talk about some of the details as some of the things we learned and the system we built that just adds a lot of value. And we know they have a lot of value because we lived with it for years. And so, in the second hour today we’re going to be pointing out some of those things and then some of the people sitting here or around are going to sort of talk about the stages we could actually launch in order to do something like that. Even if it’s voluntary. Even if it’s just inviting the world to go open source and explore it with us. So anyway, these are general terms here.

<SLIDE> REQUIREMENTS FOR OHS – AN OPEN HYPERDOCUMENT SYSTEM

Engelbart: That’s to facilitate collaboration, coordination, and collective work, real work; to capture, integrate, and manage the emerging heterogeneous knowledge; to enhance access, maneuverability, and reutilization; scaleable, interoperable across domains etc. All kinds of virtues and things like that. Those aren’t terms that you hear very often now but, unless people share a similar perception about how much more there is to learn about how to use these sort of knowledge packages and what they should have is properties in them and functionality on them like that. If you don’t have a common picture, if you sort of think that the way the web works; the web pages are now is we’re there well, then we’re not talking the same language. So again it’s a paradigm issue that affects very, very much how seriously someone would take about considering this and going after it so… So anyway, I just invite people to start getting active about at least talking more seriously to shake it up. In our… In this sort of world that ended up; we call the augment world, we long time worked on this kind of a package for… that we call it through away e-mail. Because anyway… So we’ve talked this in the past that shared files and e-mail all were interlinkable from nineteen seventy on to any detail you wanted to and optional viewing so a link could save; popped to someplace a say how you want it to be viewed. That when you follow this link, I want this view presented to you because that sort of depicts the issues about that citation issue that I wanted to characterize. So there just grew to be more and more and more kinds of viewing option specs than the language like that. And then we got his journal system up which meant that it was a library like thing that any organization could run according by specs and it meant that if you were qualified to enter information there, you just submitted a document electronically almost like it was an e-mail and it took it into its embrace and it would give you either beforehand or then an identifier for that that stayed permanent and guarantee that at anytime anybody used that identifier in a link to access what they’d get was what was you published that minute and that no one could change it. And a… if they wanted to update it, they’d have to… When they entered it have to say this is super seating that earlier one. So that anybody going with a citation link that would aim at the earlier one would stop in mid-travel to say, it’s been super seated. Do you want to new one or the old one? So there would be more… smarter ways to do it than the time we did it at the tie like that. But that just … You just have to believe me, I guess… It changed the way the dialogue worked; just changed immensely from the way it is today. So anyway, and then external documents were also catalogued. There were many things in there that would take hours to show and tell, which is something that… Because of the way this presentations we give here are packaged and webcast etc. we can’t give live demonstrations. So we give these things were a slide shows this is one state and then here’s the next picture and here’s the next picture. I’ll give a few of those in the next hour. But one of the things I really want to do is… is fix up so that we can get some demonstrations so this and other systems around and have those archived in ways in which anytime somebody say, "Oh you’re talking about a feature? Yeah, we use that here. I’ll give you our own little point right to the demonstration segment where the guy’s showing about it and another URL: where there’s a description of it like that. And if you have comments to make you can do it. Or when you get there and are watching that, the backlink management if you want to, find out whom else is talking about that same passage. Either passage in the video or my slide or in text or e-mail. So these are all things that are just going to evolve. And there are parts of them out there that have to be marked together. So anyway, so this open eye per document system is fundamental key. So we go to the next target in here… Next paradigm, which is, oh suppose making headway that we found ways in which we can improve an organization capability. Well that’s an interesting resource. Where would be best to ploy it? So that’s what that deployment target thing is about and like that, see. So, out of that came the idea of hi performance teams. That this was something a very promising and it grows on you. And the more you think about it. As an element in a strategy about how you explore high performance organizations and is starting out by getting them in teams.

<SLIDE> ABOUT HIGH-PERFORMANCE TEAMS

Engelbart: So he says, "Okay, we need explicitly recruited, equipped and trained, as though for competitive performance assessments." And here we’re not talking about that you just designate the sales team or design team as going to be your high performance team and you give them a little bit more lessons in another. Sure they’re moved up like that but, that isn’t what we are talking about of a way to really move out in that frontier. So anyway, we just say no limit to the usual ways in which their fundamental sensory, perceptual, cognitive, motor capabilities and trained, conditioned and harnessed. Just anything… anything you can think of. Put to work for them. Strategically, seems best at first to be engaged as support teams providing special services to larger teams operating in current mode. So we’ve talked about that before and I would like to dig down into that with people to say more of a rational for why etc. or examples of what you can do. But it’s just really very, very basic. So this is the picture we’ve used for a long time.

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP "PARADIGM MAP"

Engelbart: In this paradigm map we’re saying all right, here’s the distribution of capability to our organization and that curve is not… It would be some kind of sideways "S" curve I’m sure. But the thing was is saying, one option you can come in and say I’m going to improve everybody’s capability. That ‘s mode one of improving it. And a… this is sure you know, if… If you introduce e-mail and everybody has access to it, you’ve done something for everybody. But if we’re going to get more and more kind of exploratory and dramatic well what you’re going to do… He says well, I really need to test it first. So let’s… Let’s get some small, specially trained group like that and elevate them in capability. But we need to do it so they can work with the rest of them. And a… So that’s part of the whole strategic sort of issue in plan. Well another mode then is, if you have one like that as you can expand it. That’s mode three. Mode four is that you just duplicate it. So I couldn’t think of any modes by which you’d start bringing significant new capabilities in an organization. So he says, "Okay, these are all modes. And strategically speaking, which of those modes are the best return on investment. So anyway, it’s interesting. So when we were introducing things starting nineteen seventy-four for the operant providing service that was just like in that box I showed you integrated mail and file and journal and a lot of characteristic and features in the there that were quite dramatic. And we were doing this to people who had access to the arpanet, which committed to government etc. But as one if the things we were trying to tell him is you, you, you ah… need to sort of focus on specific groups and help them move ahead. 䄀渀搀 Then every time they get together, we always hear about people saying "you gotta make it easier to learn. It’s hard." Until one time, one time one of the guys was sitting there listening and says, "You know, I’ve never heard that in my organization lately." And Elle says, "Well that’s because you know, you aren’t bringing in new people." "Oh but we are." And he was the longest user. When they go to figuring this out well, what it meant was a new user came in and looked around; everybody else was a matter of fact using it. No big sweat. Sure you don’t know how but it’s easy so all you had to do was ask somebody at another desk. Sure I’ll show you and tell you. And it was just taken for granted about how they came in and got assimilated and learned. And so there wasn’t any of this big stress like when new groups suddenly get plunked into the middle of it. So the evolution ability of a group like that is something that is group culture conditioned and something just to train. So if… anyway…

Peter: There is a fifth mode that you probably want to recognize and that’s one of the most… I have the button pushed. I don’t know if it’s doing any good. The fifth mode is probably the one that is most common in the world business today. And that is you take something away from somebody and give it to somebody else. And so you create an indentation in your model and you move that inverted upside down somewhere else. So you’ve actually deprived a certain group of the resources looking on it as a zero sum game and I think in the practical world that’s very common. I don’t like it but that’s how it works.

Engelbart: All right, thank you. That’s the trouble with a guy like him. He makes you think. Thank you Peter. Well I’ll get back on him later. Great… Anyway, that’s… It’s just the kind of this of how it is so if you had a research group that was building a dynamic repository, you’d like to start collecting this scoop and information in the lower… in the case studies of things that’d be valuable. So anyway, progressing around this… this says okay, then the key deployment for high performance support teams and the idea that we ended up with watching how things worked out in our own world…

<SLIDE> A KEY DEPLOYMENTFOR HIGH PERFORMANCE SUPPORT TEAMS

Engelbart: Is supporting a larger, conventionally capable community, organization, or project team. So a high performance team in the middle as a support team is just, just a… So in a way, our trainers were acting like that and the fact we had the shared screen kind of capability from seventy-four on so that somebody could call up and say that they were in trouble and they could connect so… No matter where the two of them were on the network and they would both be seeing the same display working and then the trainer could say, " I see what you are doing. Hey, you know there is a better way you can do that." "Oh yeah, tell me." "Oh no, wait a minute. Pass me the controls and I’ll show you." So then the trainer starts off operating it and the other person watches. It’s just a big step ahead in the flexibility by which people out there started being able to sort of get help and depend upon people. And much more friendly thing than if was only talking on the telephone. That they’re actually just… It was almost like somebody could; coming in sitting down next to you and showing you. And since they could just do it electronically, it was much more flexibly usable. So anyway, so… These high performance support teams thing was just kind of blew my mind and I really think that there is a great deal you could in the middle of complex projects for instance or the middle or any company. And when you talk about the CoDiak which was the concurrently developing, integrating and applying knowledge. That integrating role is sort of like a digestion and stuff like that. What all is happening in there, how do you sort of integrate as rapidly and effectively as you can so that people can go look at it as though it an up to date handbook. That’s what we used to called it. So anyway, so the a… The thing about you’re getting ready for that frontier these A, B, and C that we’ve talk about it become very important like that.

<SLIDE> READYING THE ORGANIZATION FOR FRONTIER PENETRATION

<SLIDE> ABC’s OF THE ORGANIZATION’S FRONTIER PENETRATION

Engelbart: So we say okay, the C kind of thing is like a scout out in the frontier; is to finding out what’s happening out there. Where can I help find a good place for you to aim at and tell you sort of more about how you can move better out there. Then the B is the one that is the, leads the wagon train that’s going to go out there and like that. So this helped a lot in clarifying for people what is this categorization like. And the common business of saying let’s pull resources to do that exploration out there to help get a better idea of what’s out there and what works and doesn’t and what are the pathways by which organizations can shift out there. So that... it’s just, if the frontier is suddenly gone out there like that then that makes sense. So if your paradigm of your organizational leaders don’t picture the frontier like that then they’re not going to be terribly responsive about the sharing business and improvement bending. But he says look, somehow we get evidence so pretty soon we’ll start having cooperative sharing between larger organizations and the sharing of the C kind of information about how it is, what’s out there, how they can move. But they’ll be moving faster and they’ll just… so I have to get examples. So we say okay, look for other organizations heading the same way and then say pull their C works like this.

<SLIDE> JOIN FORCESIN AN IMPROVEMENT COMMUNITY

Engelbart: So this was the picture we would give to people over the decades like that.

<SLIDE> NETWORKED IMPROVEMENT COMMUNITY ("NIC")

Engelbart: And say a dynamic repository is what that community best saw and then the community itself is bootstrapping itself by using the advance techniques for doing the work. And its C work is just an ideal sort of, way in which you put a high performance. So if you can make the actual actuation of that C community’s knowledge work supported by a high performance support team, then you’ve got… You got something where every organization out there is sort of benefiting by the interaction with that and witnessing it and seeing it. As well as the knowledge that thus is better organized for them. So we say that an improvement community is now part of out paradigm picture and it’s put in there like that.

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP "PARADIGM MAP"

Engelbart: So organization one, two etc. is apart of it and there is a dynamic knowledge repository and it’s in there. So we say okay, then in succeeding years we say, oh what we’d really like to do is say, "let’s make a neck of nicks."

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP ALLIANCE – "METANIC"

Engelbart: We’re headed for the network improvement company was oriented just for how you improve organizations but, now we say, let’s help a family of necks get better at being nicks.

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP "PARADIGM MAP"

Engelbart: And a… So that kind of… Kind of can get a meta-levels going in there. So he says, "Okay, if we really get this idea of these improvement communities and improvement infrastructures as over in this box to the right.

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP "PARADIGM MAP"

Engelbart: If we get that really starting to work, what’s the limit for how big you can get an organization moving like that? Can you get a national improvement infrastructure? And so look what we’ve put into here. This is… the whole nation itself could have actually be represented by a portrayal like this but so could its improvement infrastructure. So what would a national infrastructure look like? Well, there’s already one there. You know, and it’s just sort of organically grown and different parts that work differently and big government agencies have one process of changing and improving. If you can believe it. That would be a joke, I guess. But a… You know and then he says, "Oh what about the legislative part of the government? Oh would there be any room for improvement there?" And he says, "Probably." But you know, for a representative government to understand well enough what’s happening in a really complex world in order to establish laws and oversee regulations; get established. It’s just more and more so you know ordinary people no way can they understand enough to do it. And no way is sort of current politics aiming at getting something that is socially or you know what civilization, as a whole needs best. I don’t think that’s… I don’t think I’m being… Could I be shot… shot for saying things like that? Well, anyway… Anyway, you just look at judicial things too. Every aspect of our government and every aspect of the way our science is done, every aspect the way business is done, education is done, every place in which rules and worries and concerns like Terry Glen’s and Peter Yim’s work at getting these fifteen sort of major challenges to the world. So anyway, you just can look at that as says, "All right, it would be worth a great deal for people to spend time sort of decomposing and looking at what is a national improvement infrastructure. And then just saying it. Why, why, why not think about that as something that’s true? Could it start with a state? A state sort of sets the pace for doing that. Well how soon will a state say we should really ring in other states, inform ourselves a nick and of states and are working together better. Or state gets counties together or whole countries so one of the things that’s fun to welcome today is professor Ohashi here. Where is he hiding? Oh… Oh… No fair, right up in front. So he came and talked once before but he’s here today with a group of colleagues who are sitting over here, right? And a… They’re sort of visiting us and they’ve actually donated money for helping pay for the reception tonight, which we ought to be thankful for. And a… And a… So you all act very soberly and appropriately, right? Anyway but, so there’s is a challenge of sort of setting up to say okay, what could you do in a country. And one of the interesting things that Japan can do is to sort of shame the other countries about saying, hey look, we’re investing government you know, national government money into this kind of thing to make it work. So what about you other countries? So I’d wish you would say that in the direction of Washington D.C. a little bit. It would be helpful. But a… So anyway, this is just part of that paradigm. So one of the things to look and he says, "Even if the next step you say…" This is acknowledging what you guys started which is great.

<SLIDE> THE BOOTSTRAP "PARADIGM MAP"

Engelbart: This other stuff is saying a global one. Well what do to you know, the graphic looks the same. And its sort of like saying okay, in an augmented infrastructure is an augmented infrastructure. The details and the number of levels will change etc. but they has that same basic characteristic. And a… So you look at these things and says, someplace that as a real thing that is working now, sort of… If you’re gonna make it work better, you gotta build it sortta like… I gotta build a real structure to it and what is that structure sitting on? So this observation is what brings me my answer to people when I say, " I really think we should pursue this open hyper document system seriously. And really seriously pursue high performance teams and really pursue seriously that the open hyper document system provides for multiple classes of user interface and things like that cause that’s the foundation. I look at in these multiple things. If you don’t really give enough attention to that foundation, it’s hard to picture how you can design and plan multitiered thing. It’s just like you’ve got elevators and okay, we’re hooked. We can do multistoried buildings. Well yeah but you have to pay a little bit attention or you’re layering up here architecturally for foundations and structures that will sustain in that kind of scale. So it’s the same way here. So anyway, so the plan for how to get all of this started just has to take a real cognizance of this scale that you’re trying to be serious about going after. So this sometimes would inhibit the freethinking about some people if I’d said, "Let’s do this and that!" And he says, "Well, that’s going to be a pretty weak foundation." Etc. anyway. So these are plenty of things to think about. So I think this is pretty much, anyway… So, this is sort of making an appeal again for the kind of hi level needs for developing a framework and the participation.

<SLIDE> NEXT… HI=LEVEL, NEEDS FOR DEVELOPING THE FRAMWORK AND PARTICIPATION.

Engelbart: And so this global perspective it sort of emerges a general major challenge, getting each-size and type of institution, community, organization alert to the challenge and then where in the large-scope infrastructures would be the most likely to get the process underway,

Guest: Undere wayi, in the African dialect… Swahili.

Engelbart: Yeah, you can see that when I’m putting these things together… So this was probably about 11:30 this morning. I’m struggling like crazy to see what can I say next and… And anyway, I won’t even apologize. It’s… just think of the little boy milking the cow and say…

Guest: That’s utter nonsense.

Engelbart: You’re right! That’s no bull… I remember what the cow’s name, it was Samantha so, now the lecture is complete see. She used to like my whistling and I found I learned how to warble all over the place but I didn’t have any idea how to carry a tune and my sister was a violin player and she wouldn’t let me whistle in the house. So Samantha and I got aquatinted because she liked my whistling see. So anyway… So we look at these big, big scope infrastructures and whom do we get to start talking and how do we talk and find things at different levels like that to find the common things to say, "Is this idea of improvement infrastructures at these large scales something that actually society could start trying to put together?" And if Japan starts trying to do something coherent as the nation, that would just be a very good lesson. And other countries ought to do that too. And I’d take dialogue to figure out you know, it’s not going to be simple but the countries that start to do it right, I’m just sure we’ll start exponentially booting their capability to use their mental resources and knowledge etc. better. And a… Peter Yim and I once were talking about how we could go and invade China that way and a… I’ve got some friends and distance relatives in Norway that we talk about that too. And two or three countries have people from them would say, "Oh boy! Oh, boy!" So I would really like to see that kind of dialogue get going about that. So one of the things we showed before in here was diagrams I made in 1961 about you know, if you could this think with feedback.

<SLIDE> INTERNET CAPTURE

Engelbart: And in a diagram like this, the solid lines are sort of knowledge and things you can say work on this. Here is a design that something I can work on it to improve it or something and the dotted lines coming in are saying, here are tools and processes that can help you improve the way you work. So the whole thing tat started building this and making an infrastructure with those feedback lines; the dotted and solid lines. So this one may not be applicable today at all but that’s representing the kind of thing I’d really like to get going on with people that says let’s hypothesize different structures of organizational units and tasks forces etc. out there and the kind of feedback you can get and just listen and think about which ones of those combinations would have the best strategic leverage. So anyway, so the hi level… What we’re going to need is… We need help with resources and active participation.

<SLIDE> AT HIGH, GENERAL LEVEL:

Engelbart: Because it’s not enough just to give money and humbly hire… You can’t hire normal researchers to get very far in that. You have to get people who come from and been emersed in different kinds of organizations have to be involved in some of this work about getting conjectures and trying to make a picture of how things happen in there. So the value propositions that you can bring to different kind of organizations about you know, participating in an appropriate improvement infrastructure. So if you don’t get that you’re not gonna get an improvement infrastructure working. And if you don’t have one working, you’re not gonna really learn. So that’s an engineers approach to saying okay… So anyway, so we need help in raising central funding grants. We need help in recruiting active participation and so… Anybody that ideas or wants to help participate would just be very, very welcome cause it’s the hope we have about that. So anyway, we’re going to look at the infrastructure foundation for the next period and so… now we’re tying this together. So what we’re going to do next is to say, hey, I’ve been rambling around a lot here and we have ten minutes more. Who would like to sort of ask questions or make comments besides Peter? Somebody top him. Boy, I know that… Is there somebody? Oh…

Guest: Would you put your last slide up?

Engelbart: This is going to have to be…

Guest: I’d just like to hear you talk about that a little bit more and possibly leave that up during the break.

Engelbart: I’d like to propagate that around the world you know. Well there are a series of volunteers with a little bit of money that’s been donated now to start helping something called "Engelbart Fellowship Fund" and is trying to get corporations to put money into that but it got a little bit entangles because it was nice to have that given to a not for profit so that the donor would tax deductible. But then we find interesting rules about what not for profits can do with it. For instance, they can’t pass it through to the bootstrap institute because they can’t do laundry. And so…. So we were a little naïve in setting that up. So anyway we’re looking for that. We’re looking for just trying to go out to fill and tropic organizations and say, " Hey, we think we can make a very good you know, value proposition for you. For instance, you’re fill and tropic organization is really concerned about the environment so you’re trying to put money into people that are trying to do studies and promote better environmental practices. Well, if you put money into our thing one of the consequences are going to be things that we can show how to improve the capability of the people you’re trying to do this other project so… any venture that people want to bet… invest in, it looks like investing in this stuff could come around soon and start improving the capability of that investment to do it. And then also we’d would like to get with big government activities like NASA or something that says, complex projects are a great place to focus on in this thing. I’m doing that. And we also like to get people who are in the software business to particularly in that because that has even stronger bootstrapping. So this is one of things in the second hour we’ll be talking about particularly but… Anyway our people that are running now an improvement community in some size etc. well how much if they joined… Joined a meta-nick to they become a nick themselves and improve that, I’d be great. The one thing about it is that it’s gonna cost money. You have to have resources to put into this pool thing and a… So that a… That’s a thought because a lot of improvement communities are just running bare budget as it is. So there’s where you… anyway… One thing it’d be very important just to knock on the door of some big companies that pride themselves on their right at the front of the technology and stuff and say, Hey, are you going to get right at the front of being collective I.Q. smart? And would you like to sort of participate in, with others to figure out what are the measures of that and how you can advance etc. or would you like to be watch other people go together to do that and they would come and measure you. Did you have a question?

Guest: …open hyper document system or a lot focus on the tool aspect of that and I was just wondering if you’ve given much thought to working with like let’s say Jerry Glenworth with his fifteen global challenges and stuff? Just in terms of the human system revising their tools and their methodology you know, the stuff you described with the way they proposed questions and got answers through around the world seemed like an interesting new improved way of boosting an I.Q. and I was wonder about looking into fixing that.

Engelbart: Those are the things that motivated me many years ago. But the more I think about strategy; how do you get that capability richly in there? You’d end up strategically looking that earlier on you get more effectively there sooner if you’ve got the bootstrapping going. Which what… For instance this is what we’ve talking about tonight but the… Anyway it’s… Some… You know if you were helping a community that was helping learn how to make artificial rubber better or something; well you says well that might be good for the environment but their product isn’t going to come back and do anything to elevate the capability of other nicks. Whereas if you’re going to some of these others, wow, everything they put out will do it. And so… It’s a way of strategy that even in the military you’ve got to weight off the things like that. But that’s the kind of thing that I’d just would welcome people talking about but that value proposition actually goes into that. And the governments of any improvement community itself needs to decide how it’s going to invest etc. So if you’re working with communities, one of whose products is better governments, wow, that’s going to help everybody see. So you can even listen to John Bosak more happily now about… Hey, he’s trying to improve out governments so process, it would be very important and a… everybody could use that.

Guest: Hi. Well I’m really glad to be here because we spoke just couple days ago. I found just by chance this series and it turns out that we have been thinking along the same lines even though not in the detailed way you’ve been thinking. I’m trying to apply this concept. How to really, run the world, how to apply, how to create new models of governance to apply those in the political scale because we see that the lack of efficient globe institutions with the complex problems we have is really leading to or preventing us from solving problems like wars and misery and so fourth. So we laughed this last year; collation to deal with the problem how can we implement on the global level. The basic principle of democracy, which seems on the political level one of the elements that such a system, would need. How can you… the translation of what you are talking about I think on the political level is or has to include some kind of measure or implementation of democratic principle. And it’s very encouraging to see that democracy has principle or democracy has a real tool is spreading around the world. And it’s spreading at an increasing rate. So I think that we will… we’ve all ready been contacted you know… We’re just going to continue on and we really want to work with you to kind of make the connection on the political scale. How do we create those global institutions and use some of the concepts you developed.

Engelbart: That’s… And we’d say, okay we’d all benefit by joining forces. So anyway, our time I hear is running out so we’ll meet again in ten or twelve minutes for our second period and this has been good and… Thank you. In the reception… so people walk up and corner him because that’s the kind interesting candidate so go sound out the say…. Whatever that he’s organizing… how would that sort of have some mutual interaction of bootstrapping sort. So if we had lots of time it’d be nice to work with it. Okay we’ll see you in ten minutes.

-END OF PROED001 ENGELBART 03.09.00-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Engelbart Colloquium at Stanford University

An In-Depth Look at "The Unfinished Revolution"

Session 10

March 9, 2000

(ProEd001-Engelbart-2/2)

 

 

Engelbart: … number ten. And before we get started with other scheduled things, introduce Peter Yim who… who was very instrumental in organizing and getting all this stuff put together. And one of the things that he organized and single-handedly put together was the machine read-by, which we could collect in building and in beginning to build a repository. So I asked him to explain it to you, what’s out there, because later we will be talking about some of the things we can do during enhancement and it probably should be that you know what we are enhancing. So Peter…

Yim: Great… first of all I guess most of you probably already know what we are talking about, but I noticed there are some newcomers so this might be a repetition. We went through this slide in Session 3. Essentially…

< SLIDE>THE PROTOTYPE - DKR FRONTEND

Yim: … this is sort of front-end way by way of capturing colloquium inputs and the dialog. Obviously, in the center…

Engelbart: You have to use this so the people out there can see

Yim: Ok, first of all this in the center box that’s the colloquium session, which is here, and of course we’ve got Doug’s talk, we’ve got guest speakers, and we’ve got live participant contribution. We’ve got slides as some of you who go to the archive, or even of course you can go to the live, but I mean the live and the archived web cast you see slides that are synchronized, you’ve got the audio and video stream. One thing that is coming up, we don’t have it yet, but it will be in a couple of weeks, we will have transcripts of all the sessions, I mean, one through ten. That would be sort of the colloquium session inputs.

<SLIDE> THE PROTOTYPE – DKR FRONTEND

Yim: Apart from those, a lot of you have been responding on a weekly basis to the weekly questionnaires. On session one we had about 150 responses. And on the last few sessions, the numbers dwindling. I mean obviously sometimes they haven’t been posted until fairly late, but we haven’t had enough so please, please, please, I mean, go to the questionnaires and send in the responses. Can I see a show of hands how many don’t know how to get to a questionnaire? Oh, one. If you go, do you know the website? The colloquium’s homepage is http://www.bootstrap.org/colloquium and that is on the first slide of Doug’s and it’s actually live so if you go on the slides, it’s click able. That takes you to the homepage and there’s a little gray box called "news" and within news it says I mean if you click on to that it will say questionnaire. Another way to go there is within the navigation buttons; there is one called "Discussion." If you click discussion, it again takes you onto a page that will tell you how to get into discussions and how to get onto each of the weekly questionnaires. When you are done with the questionnaire and you submit it, anybody tells me what happens?

Student: You get survey results.

Yim: Right. Yes, you get the survey results live and then, less the verbatim responses. We have not published the verbatim responses yet. We still need manpower and bandwidth to analyze them. But they will be published on sort of an aggregate basis without direct linkage to the author or the person who made those responses except for one. Actually on questionnaire number ten, which isn’t published yet, we will be asking you to maybe give an assessment of the colloquium that we can quote you on. That one we will quote you on with your name and destination. The others we will publish on a net aggregate basis. The last and most exciting one is sort of on our front-end is our on-line forum.

<SLIDE> THE PROTOTYPE – DKR FROTEND

Yim: How many in the class is in the online forum? Good, sort of 40% or so. Please again, I think that is a very exciting part of the entire colloquium. So far the number of people registered for the colloquium comes to about 1500 now. And we’ve only got, who has the latest number on the online forum, a hundred thirty something, right? So we have a hundred and thirty some people in the on-line forum so roughly about ten per cent or so. So we need more people there. But it is very exciting and the postings are great. Who has the latest number for number of postings? Eric maybe, five or six hundred postings by now. It’s just marvelous. Please, that’s a very exciting part of the colloquium. It’s on-line, a lot of issues being discussed. And all those … if you are already there, you know how to get there. If you are not, maybe someone can help me by telling the rest of the class how to get sort of signed up into the on-line forum. Anyone. Ok, maybe I’ll do it. Again, click on the discussion navigation button. It tells you how to get registered, how to sign up on to… We are using a commercial service called Onelist.com for our discussion.

<SLIDE> THE PROTOTYPE – DKR FRONTEND

Yim: The discussion group is called unrev-II@ONElist.com and among other things there are a whole bunch of services that supported the one that is being used most now, which is the threaded discussion and there are three ways you can get to the messages. One is to have those messages sent to your mailbox, two is to have the messages sent to you on a daily basis as a digest so that the whole days messages are spindled in one correspondence and sent to your mailbox. The third way is not to get it at all but at your leisure you go to the ONElist.com site and view it yourself. That’s as far as ONElist is concerned but we have also taken one step further and converted through hypermail, converted all the exchanges into HTML pages, and again they are available as an archive if you navigate from the colloquium homepage. Again it is the discussion button, click on the discussion button, there is a button called archive. For the archive, to access the archive you need the user name password pair that is also the same one you got when you registered with Stanford. If any of you forgot that send e-mail to me or to colloquium@busscot.org. It’s the same user name password pair that will get you into the archive web cast in the future, and get you into the archive discussion group, and so on. As you read the online forum supports a lot more services than just the threaded discussions. I made a posting recently that there are like six or seven different services that are supported, so please try to make the best out of it. Back to Doug.

Engelbart: Thank you Peter. I just want to mention briefly that Peter had been so instrumental. It was his basic idea to try to do this and they went out and got the funding for it and two of the funders, supporters are here I think, and we ought to acknowledge at the reception, and anyway, putting this together was a lot of work and a lot of surprises about what it takes to do it, and Peter put this together single handed and other options we were counting on fell apart. I really need someone who is as competent as Peter to get this going. Then there is this fact of what kind of life is it. Peter has a family …(students applaud)

Yim: Thank you. I definitely will have to deny doing this single handedly. Actually we had a team of about fifty or sixty people. By the time you recognized them at the party you will know but one person I have to recognize is Shenia Yamata over there. He supported the entire system. I just sort of said what I want to see done and he did them all. (Students applaud)

Student: That means he must be a great manager right?

Engelbart: Yea, it is to bad that we are losing both of them, that economics of how to raise enough fundings so that Peter could have a salary never quite materialized, and Yamata’s father donated him and he has to go back to College in Japan in a few weeks, and we will miss them both.

Student: So this has been a great forum in many different media. What will there be going forward from here because I think of this colloquium as a start? Maybe some of this will come later but will the online forum be the main place to meet when we can’t meet here physically anymore or will it still be the colloquium home page?

Engelbart: The whole idea was that this could be starting a nucleus, have a dynamic knowledge suppository and the dialogue would be about how do we get going and what kind of intelligence we collect about the options, and how could we improve it also, which is coming later this hour, and the funding situation is slightly worrisome right now so we are just really hoping. That is why we just make no bones about it that in any event to make it go like it was once going is going to take more money and funds and people. If we have some volunteers it will help for a while but there is an end to that. So anyway yes, the whole test of it will be can we get the people and resources together and get this dynamically taking off. So like every other sermon you hear we will pass the hat, take a collection. So it wasn’t until just at the end that showed me the way you can keep track of all these things you’ve seen some of the very clumsy exchanges we have had in the past.

<SLIDE> SESSION 10 – THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION

Engelbart: I hooked up a set of slides to show you that, if I could go through them in a minute I would, I wanted to give the picture about why we are going to choose to launch specifically this sort of open source and a first volunteer base and hopefully getting other people involved into the sort of low level into making that, our lone operations work better. So I showed this picture again here about pointing out the thing of, if you get an infrastructure of organizational things working that are part of the improving infrastructure and you get the feedback lines going look it’s all great.

<SLIDE> WEB ADDRESS

Engelbart: But down here at the bottom is a core part of it that’s that foundation such again which has to be a source so that as you evolve processes and methods and learn more about it. You’ve got to be able evolve the software tools on the tools side. And so you have to get that set up so it can evolve in order for the rest of the evolution to work right. So, you know there are arguments people place about saying that there is so much money especially coming into Silicon Valley for start ups etc. Billions of dollars a year are going into software start ups and such like that, so why how would you talk about open source way to do it as a way to try to do something practical. I say, "Well, that’s something to explore." I just have a hard time seeing that the way the marketplace works that it’s going to kind of do the exploratory wide area evolution that’s needed. So the open source mode that evolved a year or two ago, it came emerged into the consciousness a year or two ago, is just a very, very interesting provocative sort of thing so we’re going just to say, "Ok, let’s give it a shot to see if we can get an open source open hybrid …system going." So, what I am going to do is show you in a kind of quick fashion some of the kind of characteristics of earlier systems that we built and worked on etc. like that that would be relatively easy to implement soon that could make quite a difference in the way that people involved in our site and actually reaching out from that site to other ones could actually get experiences that would be very different as uh where we start in all of this and then we have five gentlemen here who all we had meetings last week and they said, ok, they’ll talk. So, it’s exciting, certainly. So anyway, that business about big scale is got two ends. There’s a top end, which is really a big end, but that foundation end is something that you just can’t ignore.

<SLIDE> OUR "LARGE SCALE" HAS TWO ENDS – IT COVERS A LARGER RANGE FROM "THE SMALL ONE TO THE LARGE ONE." So this is like

Engelbart: Saying again that it has to be launched and sort of nourished as a very special part of a whole big thing.

<SLIDE> TO SHOW SOME RELEVANT INTERFACE FREATURES IN THE AUGMENT SYSTEM

Engelbart: So anyways, here are some of the things from that AUGMENT system that we’ve been publishing for years. It’s very basic that every object in a document, a "knowledge container", every object should be addressable by a citation link. So, you’re sitting and what you are writing used to be able to talk explicitly about any object in there, any characteristic that you want to. So, to have it so it’s designed just for to point to the whole document doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. Ours was like that and we carried some of that into some of the examples we put on the web site that we can show you about too.

<SLIDE> TO SHOW SOME RELEVANT INTERFACE FEATURES IN THE AUGMENT SYSTEM

Engelbart: So this introduction to the feature we are going to show that each statement which is what we call a stand alone module, which you can say a paragraph or a header would be an example, and it was automatically given at least three different kind of identifiers when it was created in our environment file, and we are just trying to show you one of them and what it means. So that meant you could sit here with a link and point at anything in an e-mail or any other doctorate and including all of our software source code was that way so an e-mail or any document could point to any line or part of source code. OR in a common field in a source code could have a like pointing at anything else. So it made a great deal of difference. One of our speakers here actually lived in that environment. Andy Projo here was a young kid without gray hair in the 70’s when he worked with us. So he works at Sundown and he has some comments to make about some of that.

<SLIDE> SAMPLE SCREEN CAPTURES – A

Engelbart: So anyway, we did some captures, screen captures so in the first one like that a recent experimental version the Augment system, a special client programmed in Smalltalk was, and it never got really done, so it hasn’t been ….You can show the screen so interesting like that. So anyway, we got a special thing to show that each one I show is the URL that positioned the browsers at that point and some click action that is ready to go will do the next step see.

<SLIDES> MORE ABOUT THE FOLLOWING SLIDES

Engelbart: These show a succession of views a regular Augment user would likely progress through, going to a file and trying to find what it, it was in a journaled copy of publishing paper, one that is online. It is called "Authorship Provisions in AUGMENT." This details the whole bunch of the unique characteristics. It was published like fifteen years ago. So anyway, the way, the usual approach to that thing is not coming to the front end of it with the whole document open like a book and scroll through. You came through with a view and hierarchy. It was showing it was a top-level hierarchy, one line each. So that is the way the thing would jump into it. With this link up here it says it is in the OAD journal, number 2250, and go inside that into the thing that was labeled with an access address location of 7C2.

<SLIDE> AUGMENT LINK: <OAD, 2250, 7c2, :wym>. (browse this paper)

Engelbart: And so that link is now there and it is a way you can do it. So you say Ok, I want to, I think there is a mistake in that. I don’t think the 7C2 belongs in this one. So anyway, these buttons in the front were set up so that if you click on the middle button it will hoist that node to the top and open up one more level between it, still at one line per each see. So lets just say we go to the next one and see.

<SLIDE> AUGMENT LINK: <OAD, 2250, 7 :mchz>

Engelbart: So do it and that is what you see. It hoisted item seven to the top and one more line deep so you are looking down at one level deep, still one line, and you say oh, windows uses what I like so I click on a middle button again there to say hoist that to the top, we will print up another level and that is what you get.

<SLIDE> AUGMENT LINK: <OAD, 2250, 7C :mebz>

Engelbart: What happened here? Oh yea, that went to 7C and you got one more level down there and now you say level clipping is what I’d like and I hoist that to the top I want to see anything. So it said ok, click on that and that is what you see. It opens up all the material with what you see. So that is what every Augment users been year after year moving around like that with the views. The views are something you implement very quickly, it is just second nature to do that. And we did it in every place, so we say all right, that is something that we could probably, very simply inaugurate in the archives that we are building. So we look at different ways of doing that and that’s what we are all going to be talking about, is some of the things we can do, this and other features in there. So those label tags in HTML document we did the same way when we convert.

<SLIDE> SO, WE DID SOME SIMPLE HTML – COMPATIBLE ENHANCEMENTS TO THE "WEB VERSIONS" OF OUR AUGMENT DOCUMENTS

Engelbart: So you will see a lot of our documents that are online and in the web. Actually they came from AUGMENT, so we fixed them up so that when they got over into the HTML they had those little nametags, those labels were on there.

<SLIDE> THE NEXT SLIDE WILL SHOW

Engelbart: So then he suggested ways to do this. We will just move a little faster. So the next slide will show a designated location in a page on our web site providing details about this Colloquium, and URL that got us to this location in this Web Page at the top, then the result of a right-button click in the Netscape browser, right button, if you click on a link it will tell you it picks up on a copy of that link so you can paste it into any other thing which would turn into a link to point right to that paragraph in that file, whenever you exercise that link. So this is the URL that got us here.

<SLIDE>http://www.bootstrap.org/colloquium/#6

Engelbart: Number six, so you see this item six here, and you see down here at item 6B1 do a right hand click and we can copy this link.

<SLIDE> AND THE NEXT SLIDE WILL SHOW

Engelbart: And suppose then that we did that so the next time then we picked up and pasted that 6B1 into something or what we did then, somebody suggested, well why not make that button actually a link to itself, so that you pick that up so that you can click on that and go there or do the coping. Now that’s a lot more like AUGMENT was so that’s great. So this is what happened when you picked up and clicked on the button 6B1

<SLIDE>http://www.bootstrap.org/colloquium/#6b1

Engelbart: It hoists it to the top. So moving around inside of here and being able to access and address individual passages, we found in the old days this was extremely valuable so we are saying how can we fix that.

<SLIDE> PROPOSING SOME SIMPLE STEPS TOWARD AN OHS PROTOTYPE

Engelbart: So anyway, the idea of doing a post process, doing it where things go into the hyper mail anyway in which the hyperlinks to say lets do a process that installs that kind of little tag buttons on every paragraph so that the e-mail you guys contribute gets processed so that you go look at it and every paragraph in there is now addressable. So if somebody else wants to comment they can put links in pointing to specific places and it boosts the capability a lot. So anyway, this is the cross linking we can get and one of the advantages of that too is that you provide back link management and the CRIT system that was discussed by Tonya Jones, where is she hiding?

<SLIDE> AND MORE…

Engelbart: She is hiding back there. Well then you can tell if you are looking at a paragraph who has been sitting it from any place else, so the dialogue gets much more enriched by that.

<SLIDE> REFRESHING, FROM SESSIO N 4, ABOUT THE EARLY NLS AUGMENT USER INTERFACE SYSTEM – FLEXABILITY ADAPTING

TO

Engelbart: The general things we were talking about wanting to do here are listed, and they are just like saying well, one of the things is that we had an interface so that whatever terminal we were using, if it was one in the set that was available, the interface automatically put a little file tied to the interface so that it made it interact with the particular terminal you had. Which what you want to have is if you are going to interact with any hand held thing, just all the variations you want to have handled, including very high performance. You want to support ways of user proficiency, which means you have to have very flexible options about what kind of interface you have. So people that really want to get in there and fly and are willing to do the training can have functions and ways to execute them that other people don’t. …

<SLIDE> REFRESHING FROM SESSION 4 ABOUT THE EARLY NLS AUGMENT USER INTERFACE SYSTEM – FLEXABILITY ADAPTING TO

Engelbart: So optional and macro-command setup is part of the thing that will tell you how it was done, executed so if there are a bunch of commands and they will do something you can write a little macro description that whenever you execute it will cause the thing happening, just as if you were doing it by hand. One of our innocent young woman trainers got someone else together and they actually built an accounting system that way. It’s amazing.

<SLIDE> APPLIC – INDEP UIS SLIDE A

Engelbart: So Anyway, user preference profiles…So basic UIS architecture there has a lot about what is potentially available in the future and the idea was you had a virtual terminal controller, you had a type of user-viewing/operating, you had a command language interpreter that was going to interpret your actions to do something and it picked up a file that was called a grammar that described how it is that you wanted when you actuated something you want to turn that into actions. So that is what they call your command language grammar. So someone can fix you up with that so you can have your own way of expressing how it is you would like things executed. So in the slide "A" it has these things, so I think I’ll move faster, but it is saying this user interface was a front end.

<SLIDE> APPLICATION – INDEPENDENT USER INTERFACE SYSTEM

Engelbart: A virtual terminal controller actually actuating with the terminal but it looked at this terminal characteristics file that was your option for how you set it up. Then a user profile file was fixed by the command language interpreter whenever you logged on. So your old user profile said hey, what about these other things you want? Which grammar file would it load, so what were the commands it would recognize and how the command scripts could be read into that same thing affecting that same grammar, and all that interact with the back end. So this was an intermediate thing that we actually happened to host on the server. So that was something we have just been waiting, the model matured then through this next kind of a slide. So that is going to call it the reach through thing that we couldn’t get funded in there, and actually did a lot more for multiple complex projects and I want to hasten to get these other guys a chance to do their presentation.

<SLIDE> MORE ABOUT SLIDE B

<SLIDE> A HUMAN WANTS AN INTERGRATED KNOWLEDGE WORKSHOP OUT THERE, THROUGH HIS WORKSTATION

Engelbart: So this was kind of a picture of how we were going to do this, with this intermediate thing here which can give you coordinated access to many servers and an interface server that you and your client, that could interact with. So this is a general sort of thing. We are talking to people in McDonald Douglas about how can we go into computer design systems and data systems, and such, but could never get the funding. So about, what was it, a year ago that we were, got a little time to do some starting, and Adam and I were looking and we ran across the IBM web system and it says oh boy, it just looks like the answer. This transcoding intermediary is what IBM offers.

<SLIDE> RE-VISITING THE POSSIBILITIES

Engelbart: WBI, web based intermediary and this is an active link that will take you to see about that (http:www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/wbi/). So anyway we got this proposal based on our intuitive sort of support of that, and we have an IBM expert here. Where did you sit Paul? Paul Maglio are you here? Is he here?

Student: He was here earlier.

Engelbart: Boy, drive him home. Anyway, so this is what happened if you want to go to that site and studied if you want to do that.

<SLIDE> BASIC USE OF A WBI

Engelbart: The idea of this general intermediary is your browser sends something and requests like an ordinary…when you click on a link and that takes care of that and it sends it to an ordinary server and it sends it back it’s ordinary thing and the general intermediary can translate that and change what you actually see. So you see that is a very good thing.

<SLIDE> WIDE, WIDE VARIETY OF NEW KNOWLEDGE SERVICES CAN BE PROVIDED

Engelbart: We say look, what we would like to do is specially coded in here, so our special coded thing goes in here that is something that maybe the end user, end server would know what to do with. WBI picks it up and says I know what to do with it. I go get that and when I pick it up I translate it into something else for you. So that is what we…Oh boy, I can even do something less common in our world. You can make a link whose address to say go to that particular place there and you will find a link, and take that link, and it’s that target I want to get when I’m using this indirect path that will go wherever this intermediate link points to.

<SLIDE> I WANT TO JUMP TO WHERE THE LINK AT XX IN SERVER A IS NOW POINTING

Engelbart: So, hey, WBI can do that. Just little things like that start immediately enriching environment considerably. So there is another thing that Neil Scott, who is sitting right here and he is going to explain to you that came out of this Archimedes Project oriented for the physically handicapped.

<SLIDE> SPECIAL RELEVANCE: INTERFACE DEVELOPMENT FOR PHYSICALLY HANDICAPPED

Engelbart: It is a really neat thing that this special total access system here that can drive a system in here by actually knowing, programming to actuate different buttons, etc. and icons that can act like a real user.

<SLIDE> HOW ABOUT USING NEIL SCOTT’S TOTAL ACCESS SYSTEM (TAS) FOR WIDE RANGING EXPERIMENTATION SPECIAL PHYSICAL INTERFACES?

Engelbart: But it can get its instructions some special way. You could have all kinds of users here. His was designed for the handicapped, which is a great move, because they can move whatever they can move that comes into the special thing and instructs the computer to do stuff. This means that people who want to try really far out ways to which I’m going to fly this computer don’t have to get limited by the kind of stuff that is there. So anyway in this co-evolution thing we hope to get a number of communities to start helping, to start using this WBI thing in order to make changes, and the very early ones were just changes of the address ability in the viewing that you can do but those are very potent kinds of things to get experience

<SLIDE> MAKING THE "CO-EVOLUTION" BE REAL, RIGHT FROM THE START!

Engelbart: So people come to our site and take links and start forwarding things around. They would just be very different from things that they see if they follow similar links from their own stuff. They just got a regular page. So anyway, a lot of things can come of it. I feel like I’d like to get these guys on the air.

<SLIDE> CAPABILITY – EVOLUTION COMMUNITIES

Engelbart: So this is one kind of a picture. If you are going to have communities working on this, you really have to get those that are interested in evolving the user systems and the conventions and the tagging you can put on, and how you start managing the dialogue and instead of depending on the things that the user mail does with their threads and stuff you can get brand new…there is a friend of mine, Jeff Conklin who took an idea that other people had evolved at Berkeley and it is called Issue Based Information Systems and he evolved it into the graphic world like this so that it really helped decide you could actually have a record of the way an issue evolved with the dialogue about it so that you could track back and find what were the prevailing issues of importance. … EOE archive where they went back and really find how do you determine the attribution of whose ideas were really responsible for shifting. So all these things were something that needed to be improved. So we are hoping all that can work. These are things I’m expecting you to read very rapidly.

<SLIDE> THE END

Engelbart: There really are a lot of things that WBI can do for that so we have now for you so energetic, pardon? Oh, the beginning. You are right. Thank you. Never underestimate the wisdom of someone who is just sitting there. I’m not kidding. It would be really interesting just if we could integrate the knowledge and the innovation capability of the people in this room. It would be some collective IQ. Ok, so we have an order. First up is Adam Cheyer, and I promised I would be able to get his system in there. Ok, Adam. Adam used to work at SRI as a researcher and now he is an executive.

Cheyer: First I would like to say I’m a little guilty that Doug rushed through just to get to us. I think it is an honor. I’m going to keep this really brief.

<SLIDE> OHS/DKR FOR B2B NETMARKETS

Cheyer: There are basically three things I want to accomplish at this talk. The first is Douglas talking about increased participations. We have been watching why this approach and this technology and methodology can do things like solve world problems and all of that, but in today’s community when people are pouring billions of dollars into the Silicon Valley I thought I’d spend a few minutes to make a business case to why this could fit into something called business to business e-commerce markets where there is really a lot of money going into so that you can go back to your friends that are in B to B startup companies and say this is what you should be doing. The second thing I would like to do is a very brief proposal about how do we organize a little bit to move forward into subgroups or teams, around the, I’m coming from a technology perspective here, and you will see a little bit of that. And my third objective is to introduce some of the other people who are going to be speaking after me by giving their views on what applications we should be addressing. Perhaps what technological approach we should be taking for moving forward. I’m now working as Douglas said at a business-to-business commerce company as director of advanced products and research. What is business-to-business e-commerce? So basically it’s like commerce for consumers, like e-bay and Amazon and these small companies like this, but someone realized that businesses spend a thousand times more money per year selling to each other than selling to consumers. So this is a really good space to get in there. Why does what Doug is doing and Bootstrap Institute is doing have anything to do with business-to-business commerce?

<SLIDE> 3C’S OF BUSINESS TO BUSINESS NETMARKETS

Cheyer: Basically any of the commerce companies, any of the companies in this space say there are really 3C’s that have to be addressed. These are content, community, and commerce.

<SLIDE> 3C’S OF BUSINESS TO BUSINESS NETMARKETS

Cheyer: I think already the content and community aspects Doug already directly addressed and the commerce aspect rely on the content and the community and we will see a little bit of this later on. A few things sort of struck me during Doug’s talk today. He was saying every technology company is moving out and here is the anticipatable future, and I realize that since joining an internet company that internet, with internet time two years is beyond what anyone can see in this space. Six months from now, we can maybe imagine what will be there, but two years is forever, so all of these things about technology are going to be dramatically pushing the limits of what we, how we need to integrate technology but even things such as e-commerce are going to dramatically improve. So we need to have capabilities that can address these problems. Another thing Doug was talking about was global scale. Why can’t government organize to do these types of cases, and maybe states and at different levels? Verticom, the company I work for, the basic idea is to organize online communities around different industries that will allow trading in this particular space. One of our communities happens to be the state of Maryland, who are trying to, there are actually a lot of knowledge, content, community and commerce that goes on by the state. We should organize as a community in a business-to-business space. So there is direct relevance with some of these topics.

<SLIDE> "VERTICAL" NICS

Cheyer: This may be a little difficult to read but basically in business to business commerce there are net markets forming around different communities or vertical industries, and you can think of them in Doug’s terms as NICS, so we have companies or group of companies who are really interested in medals marketplaces, and others chemicals and medical equipment and high tech. For all of these communities or trading communities, they need content being brought in such as articles, case studies, news, so enabling tools that allow participants to come together and start sharing information is really important for creating a successful B2B enterprise today. So the B2B people should really be looking at these types of techniques.

<SLIDE> "VERTICAL" NICS

Cheyer: Additionally knowledge and standards are going to be the things that drive e-commerce. If you are going to have companies that are going to share information and exchange information, that’s not a very simple problem. Standards such as XML have begun to address this, however you still need to have the vocabulary and processes that are going to form that will leverage XML, but will enable the exchange. So creating dynamic environments where people can co-actively produce the standards and comment on them and discuss them, very important if you are getting successful B2B commerce. So these are just two quick slides on why dynamic knowledge repositories open hyper duct systems are critical for success in the B2B space.

<SLIDE> OHS/DKR ARCHITECTURE TEAMS

Cheyer: My third and final slide is a little bit organized in a technical sense, but here is an architecture where we are going to if we had this wonderful OHS, it’s going to be driven by a number of applications. The requirement of these applications, such as B2B here will say I need to produce this type of information and exchange this type of information will inform the rest of the process. We are going to see some talks from other people coming after me about what should we be doing first with our OHS system. I want to say that I agree with the bootstrapping idea of Doug’s approach so, the things that we are using to actually produce, to improve what we are doing are the things we should do first. So for instance, the way that we communicate with e-mail and news that may be a very good candidate. The code that we develop, if we could develop better tools to develop the code we could develop the code faster. What I mean by augment is learning. What Doug has here is a particular set of documents and a system. If we can inform people, or find a way to inform people better personally as to what this system has as capabilities that will enable more people to get excited about these types of techniques and help move forward. So we will have a number of applications and I propose that we organize a set of teams around what those applications should be and what are the requirements that will move forward.

<SLIDE> OHS/DKR ARCHITECTURE TEAMS

Cheyer: Based on the applications this will determine what types of knowledge or documents do we need to produce. Is video going to be important and should it be a high priority? What type of linking will enable our applications? Do we need back links to really further particular discussions or indirect links for different pieces? What type of formats do we need to be able to convert and input, such as the one list being converted into hyper mail. .

<SLIDE> OHS/DKR ARCHITECTURE TEAMS

Cheyer: Once we have sort of document format to process we need to figure out how do we store it and what capabilities do we need to manage these documents in terms of security, versioning, and journaling. We can’t do everything. We need to start prioritizing. I of course have my particular opinions about which applications, and formats and technologies should be developed, but these are sort of teams that will need to interact to provide consensus on where to move. Intermediary, so Doug gave a few words on how things like WBI can really enable capabilities in an OHS space. Finally, how do we build, what is the client interface look like, and do we just use a standard browser or do we go build our own web browser. There’s a range of possibilities, and we really need to, there is actually a missing arrow here because what we can do here, applications will feedback into this need as well. So the proposal here is a generic one. Lets try to organize into teams and topics to discuss these interfaces, and actually start moving forward on an appropriate path. So the speakers that follow me will be discussing either somewhere in applications and documents, or some technology approaches to be using, and hopefully that will be a service and introduction as to what follows next. Thank you.

Engelbart: Our next speaker Eric Armstrong is a terror of our dialogue world out there because he ends up with more stuff out there than anybody else. Where did you go Eric? There you are.

<SLIDE> CREATING A SUPER NEWS GROUP

Armstrong: Hi. So the title is Creating A Super News Group, which has probably got to

Be one of the worst titles for a project that anyone ever came up with. It could really use a better idea. I just saw on the e-mail list this morning hyper mail, or hyper news, which is a great name. I wish I would have thought of it. In the fifth section of this colloquium I presented an idea that what we should really target for development of DKR is open source development. Because doing that would give us maximum leverage to building the kind of systems we need for all the other areas and I focused a lot in that talk on the advantages of using hyperlinks and hierarchical structuring for source code. So there is a big picture that we want to get to. A product or a mechanism that will enable a wider universe to be more effective. Now taking from there I want to focus in now, what is the smallest core nucleus that we can build that will help us to get to the target place? The reason for getting a small nucleus is several folds. You want something that is going to be useful as soon as possible so you can use it do to your own design with. You want something that will be widely useable. A news group of some kind is going to be useable by everybody, not just source development. And by giving you a highly constrained initial target it ups your chance for success. The reason for that is if you are dealing with a complex area, design and development is a process of exploration and discovery. It’s not an assembly line process of simply spec it and builds it. So you reach it. You design a very simple system, you build features for it. To get to the next level you have to redesign. You redesign that level and you keep the same features until you test it and you know it’s working, and then you add the features that new design allowed you to add. You ratchet your way up to the larger picture and that gives you the ability to expand from there.

<SLIDE> BASED ON…

Armstrong: Now this all started with Doug’s observations that hey, we already have an e-mail archive that is in HTML form. I happen to think that is a great achievement because translating plain text into HTML in an intelligent way is not an easy problem to solve, but they have done that. If we add an intermediary he suggests we can add the kinds of links that augment gives you and take advantage of what they have already deduced as being necessary in this domain. What really got them excited is they realized hey, if we did that we could probably use that for any HTML page out there, and change the way people use the web. So that is an intriguing prospect, and it convened a whole bunch of us here together to start talking about it. There was an interesting thing in the news paper the other day that if you get six engineers in a meeting, you probably get about twelve opinions. This is no different. We had a lot of interesting ways to go about the project. We also had a convergence on a couple of key areas that make since. Again, it emphasizes the fact that we need this system to explore the design space. We need something along these lines that will help us be more intelligent on how we carry on the discussion.

<SLIDE> "SUPER NEWS" MOTIVATION (MY TAKE)

Armstrong: We want to be able to do it remotely so that people out in the web space will be able to get the best brains in the world out on the project. It is infinitely better than even the best brains in this room, which is considerable. The one challenge said hey, how about if you guys that are there, physically adjacent, put together an initial system that we can then make use of to design the next version, because it is really hard to get started with the tools we have at our disposal today. Now if we take this task, we begin, what we want to do really is to eliminate the copy redundancy in the e-mail archives. .

<SLIDE> "SUPER NEWS" MOTIVATION (MY TAKE

Armstrong: What happens when you get e-mail is to reply to it, you have a copy of it, you insert your comments and now all the old stuff is still all there. It makes it very hard to search to reuse the content. With this kind of a mechanism you get sort of documents that grow organically, people add to them. Now I’m not addressing here some of the issues that you really want to do at some point is to distill the documents. You want them to grow, but you also want a distillation process. That’s the second sort of mechanism that has to come after this one.

<SLIDE> THE UNDERLYING DATA MODEL

Armstrong: So the data model you get when you look at an HTML document is a structured document on the left, it is called a document object model, in XML/HTML terms. Actually it goes deeper than this. Each block there is sort of a unit of structure in this sense. What you want to do is respond to an element in that message, not have to respond to that message as a whole. That eliminates the copy redundancy. You already have threading in your mail list of clients hopefully, and what we simply want to do is add that hierarchy, bring it down to the level of the message, and take advantage of the same facilities. Now the response is again also a tree of, each of which has it’s own responses.

<SLIDE> WHAT IT MIGHT LOOK LIKE (1/4)

Armstrong: So here is an idea of what it may look like. On the left is an HTML document, as it would normally appear in a browser. We added some plusses there. Those are similar to the kinds of icons in the augment system. If you switch to an outline view you would simply see H1 and H2 tags, you see those on the top right, or switch to the single line view, which gives you a little more information. What’s interesting here is that in that single line view, again that hierarchy is not clear, looks like the list of folders in your directory structure, or in your mail processor. Moving forward from there.

<SLIDE> WHAT IT MGHT LOOK LIKE (2/4)

Armstrong: We do one more thing with the intermediately processor, which is to add those little links at the end which are self referential to point to that paragraph. That lets you copy them, put them into your own message, or it allows for the client that is dealing with this system to intelligently respond, to identify the piece of the message that you are responding too.

<SLIDE> WHAT IT MGHT LOOK LIKE (3/4)

Armstrong: So in this kind of a system, when a couple of people respond to you it could look a little something like this on the left. Fred responds just like in an e-mail message. It’s attributed, you know whom it came from, and it’s in line, it is in context. It is not disassociated from the text it was originally referring to. Or you might have a button at the end that you click to hide those things. You see the original message rather than the responses.

<SLIDE> WHAT IT MGHT LOOK LIKE (44)

Armstrong: Or another option was that you might have an icon for individual messages and they could show up in another window. The point being that…I’m racing. I’m going to quit in another couple of slides. The point being that you have different client potentials that you could build on the same fundamental system, and you want that flexibility.

<SLIDE> MAJOR BENEFITS

Armstrong: The third item there is that you want to create an open standard. The reason for that is that it lets lots of people get into the game. You want lots of people devising servers, devising clients, coming up with the best possible interaction mechanism. What we come up with may or may not be the best, given 100 organizations out there doing the same thing. One of them is going to emerge as a winner. You want to preserve attributions, preserve discussions, and be able to reuse them.

<SLIDE> UNADDRESSED (AT THIS TIME)

Armstrong: Several things you don’t want to address right up front are those things that make the problem too complex to solve. You don’t know the answers offhand. There are a lot of things you have to leave out of Version 1.

<SLIDE> ARCHITECTURAL COMPONENTS

Armstrong: Architectural components that we’ve looked at… intermediate processing… the web lets are a great way to get your hands on that DOM and modify it inside the context of a browser or as a stand-alone application. XUL is another mechanism that’s being developed as part of the Mozilla browser.

<SLIDE> DEVELOPMENT STAGES (1/3)

Armstrong: We identified three development stages. First is simply browsing, to be able to look at it. Get those features.

<SLIDE> DEVELOPMENT STAGES (2/3)

Armstrong: Second is if you maintain a local copy you get interesting capabilities, such as you already have in your email. Be able to highlight the new and unread portions of a document. So when an update comes in, you automatically know what you haven’t read yet. Another is now you can say "I want to ignore this whole thing" or "I want to see just new versions of this document" or "I want to follow all of the discussions in my inbox."

<SLIDE> DEVELOPMENT STAGES (3/3)

Armstrong: Finally, there’s a more integrated editing system. You need versioning and stable anchors. I’m going to end here, so that everyone else gets a chance to spend a few minutes. The rest of the seven slides are just a review of some of the design options we looked at. Again, there are multiple ways to skin the same apple. We need a system like this ourselves to make sure we intelligently explore the design space. (Applause)

Engelbart: So next we have Jack Park, who works at the same place that Adam does. I hadn’t met him before last week and I’m really pleased about it, because he’s bringing you guys some kinds of orientation that I’ve been hearing about for years and saying "That kind of stuff has to get integrated". <Slide-Literate Knowledge Programming>

Park: I have one objective and not much time. My objective is to introduce the tractor basin called knowledge representation. I’ve heard people refer to it as a black hole. Now, Doug was talking about surgical implants of knowledge devices, which made me think: "What would an implanted memory device in your tooth do to oral exams?" There’s a timeline that brings me to this session and I just want to take a brief moment to go through it. In the same year that I graduated from high school, Doug wrote a paper for the Air Force that fundamentally described what we’re all doing now. Some 25 years later, I did an expert system for the Air Force that basically that changed my career path into the area of knowledge representation and that sort of thing. I later built a program I call the scholar’s companion, and it’s whole objective was to enhance the IQ of the individual using it. I spoke of something called the "Apparent IQ of the Human Computer." Doug speaks of the collective IQ. So there’s a tremendous parallel between what Doug has been doing and what I’ve been doing. By the way, there’s another parallel: I used to milk goats. (Laughter)

Student: Are you kidding?

Park: No, I’m not. Actually, goats are easier to milk than cows, by the way. What I want to talk about is…

Student: (Inaudible)

Park: I won’t go there.

<SLIDE> OHS/DKR AS A KNOWLEDGE BASE

Park: I see the OHS/DKR package as a knowledge management system in a slightly different way than Doug has been talking about it, and I think that’s why he’s asked me to speak today. I say that it can contain domain knowledge of the kind that physicists have, and cow-milkers have and so forth, but the OHS itself can provide us with a knowledge editing/viewing/browsing environment. We’re very interested in having multiple ways to view that which we call knowledge. That, in fact, is where I wish to go very briefly. Many people have different ways of carrying their knowledge. We have in this room a brilliant mathematician. I tend to think in terms of concepts and relations. Others think in terms of logical equations. And there are many other ways. We don’t have time to go too far into them but let’s look at sentences. A big picture…

<SLIDE> KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION

Park: You think of a cat as a mammal. You can say it in a logical statement. In this case, a prefix variant co-… Where you’re expressing that a cat is an animal. Or you can put it out visually in concept maps. I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that almost everything that has been presented to you here has been presented to you visually in almost exactly that form. Now I drew from John F. Sawes concepts, which he calls conceptual graphs. We’ll go there just a little bit more. I really want you to recognize the fact that I can represent graphically facts, statements of beliefs, just about anything I want, in a graphical/visual way. But I can also represent it electronically in the memory of the computer.

<SLIDE> CONCEPTUAL GRAPH EXAMPLE

Park: By the way, that’s a hot link so that you can see where I shamelessly copied this graph off the web. You should go and read the whole paper, by the way. I have gone and coupled something Donald Knuth did, called Literate Programming with what I call Knowledge Engineering.

<SLIDE> LITERATE KNOWLEDGE PROGRAMMING

Park: Now, where we’re going with this is as follows. Literate Programming allows you to write a document with lots of prose, where you are essentially saying "Here is what I want to do, here is how I’m going to do it, and by the way, here’s the code." The neat part about it is that you can send that entire document, through a filter, to a computer, and a compiler will pull the code out and go ahead and build your program. Well, what if we did the same thing with reference to chunks of knowledge, where we were able to write a book, and in that book, have our diagrams, and have those diagrams go directly into the memory of the DKR, and become usable by others. Meanwhile, you still have a text document where other can say, "I see where they came from." One really useful thing about this is that it supports the constructivist way of teaching kids how to do things. The kids can sit there and construct their own little diagrams very similar to the one we saw before. This is a great way for teachers to probe the depths of the knowledge of the child, is to allow them to express it the way a lot of people think, and that’s visually.

<SLIDE> LITERATE KNOWLEDGE PROGRAMMING TOOLS

Park: So we need an editor for textual materials, our narratives, and our links. We need many editors for formal knowledge materials. We need to be able to build concept maps, logic statements, mathematical equations, and so forth. I close with just a little sketch of how my vision of using the OHS: where individuals at a console create a document, write their background narrative, they enter their knowledge structures, and they enter their links, and it becomes a permanent record within the DKR. That’s it.

Engelbart: Thank you very much. Well, these are things I’ve been waiting for, so thank you. I get the images of all the different ways you can learn to portray and manipulate and it’s just terrific to get examples of them showing up. OK, Andy Poggio? Andy’s the kid that once worked with us. He’s got some experience using Auto knit (?) for stuff, and now works at Sun, as a manager, no less. It’s hard to imagine that kid being a manager.

Poggio: The people who work for me say exactly the same thing. There goes my first boss, by the way, out of school. Talk about incredible luck. So, I want to spend just a minute giving you a pragmatic picture of why I care more than ever about the things that Doug is doing and things like open Hyper Document systems. As Doug said I work at Sun Microsystems. At Sun, we build computer systems of all sizes. We build little tiny ones. The Sunrays that we make are basically a frame buffer in a network interface, and really nothing else. We build big giant ones, Enterprise 10,000’s, with 10’s of processors, and gigabytes of memory, and terabytes of mass storage. I want to give you a brief picture into that world, and how what Doug is talking about really applies, and why we really need it. One of the changes that has happened over the last decade or so is it used to be that hardware people drew things, and software people wrote things. Well, it’s all looking more and more like software. Hardware people are doing a lot less drawing and a lot more writing than they used to. Everything is scaling up. System boards, you know, the circuit boards that go in your computer systems, have 18 layers and more of interconnections.

<SLIDE> PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGES

Poggio: In a single integrated circuit, we’re moving above 1,000 pins into the area of 2,000 pins, just for one integrated circuit. Even the little thing that the silicon die connects on to that maps the pads on the die to the actual pins that come out is a little circuit board with a few thousand connections on it. Even those are problematic these days. Integrated circuit gates for Acex: 2 million and up, processors beyond that: 8 million and up, and operating systems lines of code 10’s of millions. This stuff is all essentially information, looks a lot like text in lots of cases, and it’s all being scaled because of Moore’s Law. All this stuff, including the size of software, is really being enabled by what we can do with Moore’s Law. What’s going even faster than that, which I think you’ll all recognize, is networking bandwidth. Networking bandwidth is going even faster than Moore’s Law, and that’s basically because of demand and optics, and a few things like that. Where as Moore’s Law says that everything doubles every two years or so, networking is going up by about a factor of ten every two years or so, outgrowing Moore’s Law, causing some interesting problems for us. So, all of this information interfaces to the other bodies of information, and there’s all kinds of opportunities to get it wrong. Most of these things are at least semi-automated if not highly automated, but there’s always a human aspect, and we’re always pushing what the tools can do, right, cause we’re always growing faster than the tools can be developed.

<SLIDE> DEFECT SOURCES

Poggio: So you can make mistakes going from mapping the wafer to the pins in the IC, from the pins to the board, from the board to the software driver, from the driver to OS modules, from OS modules to other OS modules, and from the operating system to applications. All of those interfaces and more have opportunities to get it wrong, and it happens all the time. It’s not getting easier, it’s getting harder. So, there’s lots of information linking opportunities. An open Hyper Document system could tie together and make this all a lot easier to do.

<SLIDE> INFORMATION LINKING OPPURTUNITIES

Poggio: The requirements documents, those go into specifications for products. Then there are hardware designs, interfaces, and the source code. Just like I said, Verilogue, which is what we do our Acex in, looks a lot like C, as does Java. There are software design interfaces in source code as well. There are external dependencies from suppliers and parts and partners and partners and strategic development relationships. There are schedules from per charge. There is user documentation and when you finally start chipping something, there are problem reports. All of this stuff should get tied together. They’re fairly elaborate systems for each little piece but there is nothing that ties them all together in some useable way and to make this tougher still, especially in silicon valley, people move around. All right, a processor these days takes four to five years to develop. You can expect something like a ten percent change of people working on it every year. So there are a lot of new people coming in. They need to get up to speed. They won’t see those links that some of the people that have been involved a long time will see. So if something overriding that ties this stuff together that gives you different detailed levels of view and automates a lot of this would be hugely, hugely valuable and any investment you make in this would be terrific. Today those environments are very domain specific. They have to be but they are interlinked well with the other domains.

<SLIDE> INFORMATION CREATION ENVIRONMENTS

Pogo: There is nothing that facilitates collaboration except some basic things like source code control. It’s all got to work reading and writing. Reading is interesting but the creation part’s the writing and we need to do it with source and version control. So, I would love to see and hyper open document system come information and apply it across this kind of broad domain. That’s it.

Engelbart: So we don’t… We don’t have to quit right at seven minutes later because of the way the tapes go. And so a… How’s that? So um… So you know these other guys are bringing other things in that have mutual interactions that are very important. So his field is just very important, as I’ve indicated before. So, start talking.

<SLIDE> BOOTSTRAP COLLOQUIUM THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION – II

Scott: Okay… I’ll talk fast.

<SLIDE> THE ARCHIMEDES PROJECT

Scott: My main work is ensuring everyone has the access to the information. We’re creating an infrastructure where information is being made available but if you can’t use the tool that are provided like the keyboard and mouse or your eyes you’re blocked out. And this is actually very serious in many cases where societies are adopting thing like information kiosks where you get your money or pay your bills or renew your driver’s license. Someone who can’t use that device is disadvantaged. We started off here at Stanford doing this and we’ve been getting comments from all around the world saying, "We want to do the same thing." And so I’ve added to my original thing, which is looking at individual needs, abilities, and preferences is something we have to take care of to add in culture because different countries have different ways of doing things and because we are becoming global we have to take note of that. For many years we made access by modifying the system that people would use.

<SLIDE> TOTAL ACCESS SYSTEM

Scott: We’d get inside of the computer and change it. That has become totally impractical. You know the computers change faster than we can change them. And also if you change a computer you then have to look at it for the rest of your natural life. It’s a problem. So the system that I developed, we called total access system says let’s split the problem into two parts. Leave the target system alone and give the person something that allows them to interact with any of the things in the environment. The nearest analogy I’ve come up with is my spectacles. If I take them off, you will all look really funny. You’re sort of blurry. I put them back on and by magic you’re there. These are my business. I’ve been wearing glasses since I was three years old. There are other people here with glasses on. If we swapped their glasses it wouldn’t work. Some of the people let’s say the infrastructure should look after it. It’s like saying every window in the world should be automatically curving to adopt a debt to my needs. It’s not going to happen. So we have to allow people to move around and use the things in the environment by bringing with them what makes sense for them to bring. We call that device a personal accessesor. The piece that goes between the personal accessor and the target is a little box where we put the translation material to make this thing operate the keyboard and mouse and read the screen of the target system and turn it into a standard thing here. Now a lot of the computer companies for a long time because looking in that hole every computer looks identical. A sun, a SGI, a PC, a MAC whatever… they all look the same thing because we made them all understand the same set of standardized commands. The idea is very simple. It’s one of those things that people see it and say, "Oh that’s so simple, I could have done that!" Yeah well…

<SLIDE> TOTAL ACCESS SYSTEM

Scott: It’s a little bit like… doubts things you know, it’s obvious once you’ve done it. But what we are working on is that between the user and the excessive device whatever that might be, is very specific to the user. It’s human centric design. It’s what does this person need? Between the accessor and the TAP is universal so that any accessor can work with any TAP. Between the TAP and the target machine specific. So the key thing is that we’ve taken away the knowledge of the machine from the user. They don’t need to know. And so…

<SLIDE> EXAMPLE 1: ACCESS SYSTEM FOR A PERSON WITH A MONITOR IMPAIRMENT

Scott: Some quick examples of this in practice a… The person I’m going to show you in the next photograph broke his neck in a diving accident when he was seventeen years old and his system has a speech system running in this notebook.

<SLIDE> PHOTOGRAPH

Scott: He has his MAC TAP here connected to a Macintosh just hidden on the off the side of the screen and he has a head tracker. And I defy anyone to use a Macintosh more accurately or more quickly than J.B. He worked with me for about five years and he’s at… just finishing an MBA at Berkeley now. I don’t know if I’ll ever get him back but basically the key thing in working with someone like J.B. was no one ever conscience was aware apart from you people. But the people who worked on the project would… you never thought as J.B. as being any different than anyone else. The only we thing in the morning was we’d slip his headset on. We go the robot to do that. That was their intension but I never got enough faith in the robot to let it… he’d end up wearing the headset on his nose. But the head tracker allowed him to do all mouse functions and his voice allowed him to do everything else; clicking the button whatever. The way we’re working is to allow people to mix and match.

<SLIDE> MULTIMODEL ACCESSORS

Scott: Things like head tracking, speech, foot switches, and mouth switches, whatever. But the target system remains totally unchanged. We then had the situation where you know…

<SLIDE> MORE IMPORTANT, VISUAL IMPAIRMENT…

Scott: Sun may think that all the computers in the world are SUNs and Microsoft thinks they’re all PCs and so on but really there are few others. And we find that Judy who came to us.

<SLIDE> PHOTOGRAPH OF JUDY

Scott: She was… She had reached a pretty high level as a programmer here in Silicon valley in some of the big companies and she’d reached the point where she was the person that you’d get when call up with a problem and she’d help you walk through it. But her elbows gave out with tendonitis. So before I met her, she’d been out of work for eighteen months. We had her back up to speed in one week and her job was to workout how we say the same thing to the speech accessor and we’d get the same result on all of these different computers. So at this time all she has to say was talk to the PC and then just say whatever she was doing. Talk to the SUN, do exactly the same thing and exactly the same thing would happen. Eye tracking…

<SLIDE> SMI EYEMOUSE SYSTEM FOR PC

Scott: Normal sort of scheme as there is this infra red light source shines on your eye, you get a different reflection from the retina and from the front of the eye you calculate with the person whose looking through the camera. And in this case the person is looking at a little keyboard on the screen and typing just by looking at the letters. For a long time it was seen as the Holy Grail turns out that it’s actually not because our eyes don’t work the way we think they work.

<SLIDE> HEAD MOUNTED EYE TRACKING ACCESSOR

Scott: They actually jerk around and our brain is integrating all these images and it’s very, very difficult to tie together but we’ve got we think one of the best eye tracking systems now. We’re working with a German company to mount the whole device in a little thing that just sits down on your face and it’s head tracking, eye tracking, and voice. Head tracking does the mousing, eye tracking does the selection for menus and things you can do very well and the voice does all of the commands. Humble switch…

<SLIDE> SWITCH ACCESSOR

Scott: You think of a switch as just a switch. Put a microprocessor in there and teach it the codes and it becomes a very helpful tool because how the accesses can tell the switch, "oh until I tell you otherwise you’re a indicate for a SUN or until I tell you otherwise you’re the left mouse button on a PC or whatever it might be or I’m going to give a very complicated command and if it screws up, here is what you have to do to undo it. And so you can have a logical forward, a logical undo whatever. Hand Held Accessors…

<SLIDE> HAND HELD ACCESSORS

Scott: I can drive a SUN or a PC or a Macintosh totally from my palm pilot. Never touch the keyboard or knock on the other thing and have total over it and the SUN and whatever else is totally unmodified because the TAP is seeing exactly the same thing as whether I’m talking to this or using graffiti. It still looks the same.

<SLIDE> HAND HELD ACCESSORS

<SLIDE> MULTIPLE INPUTS

Scott: So this is a system where we are working on how to balance out.. Where do you use speech, head tracking, eye tracking, foot switches, hand writing whatever because each does a job well for a person who is disabled, you’re pinning them to taking one particular choice. For the rest of us, we can mix and match all the rest. Ben is not disabled.

<SLIDE> MULTIPLE INPUTS

Scott: He’s a very, very bright program here at Stanford from the… graduating the CS department. But he was using all of these different functions together and we’re working out you know… an eye tracker to select from a menu is like magic. Because when you use a mouse, you move the mouse to it then you do something that opens. You then looks at what’s happened, move the mouse to it. When you use eye tracking you look at it and it flows open and your eye naturally flows to the next thing and so the menus just ripple. And it’s like magic. It really is but a… okay Haptics, blindness…

<SLIDE> HAPTIC

Scott: The… What we did for the blind people was basically take people just as qualified as any of us sitting here and turn them out on the street about five or six years ago because they couldn’t handle all the new software that came in that was totally graphical. We’re working… This prototype of a device called the moose all right, the mouse with muscles. And what it is, it’s a mouse that’s got two thumping great motors underneath the middle here that let you feel where it is. There’s a… It’s evolved into a practical mouse that has little motors under here.

<SLIDE> HAPTIC DISPLAY

Scott: It can’t compete with a moose in the sense with a moose we can take where we want you to go. With this one it’s more psychological sensation of you going there but we’re looking at how do we tie this into the system. Including this drawing. This is something that Adam and I worked on for what, six months? Evolving for a grant proposal we where preparing.

<SLIDE> TOTAL ACCESS SYSTEM

Scott: And I put it in because this part here, the accessor looks rather like drawing Doug has shown a several of times where you have the user interface coming out. And he had a terminal file and the grammar and so on. Where we’re looking towards is having a lot more information about the real world that we’re interacting with. But that it’s my version of what needs to be done and what’s out there and I’m in directing it knows hell of a lot about me, it learns.

<SLIDE> INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION

Scott: But we still have full control over the systems. Rushing on to the next part which is… That’s the piece that goes in the hardware end of it The other part that I’ve been working on for quite a few years now as… as I said, we started getting inquiries from other counties about, Oh we want an Archimedes project too. We like what you’re doing. And currently we’re talking with groups all around the world about establishing a similar project.

<SLIDE> ARCHIMEDES WORLD MAP

Scott: And the goal is get them up to speed with what we all ready know, help them make it indigenous so that in Shi Lanka for example we may supply some little module but they supply the rest of it to make it an indigenous industry and then get them involved in helping us with the research that need to be done. And… Currently…

<SLIDE>WEB BASED COLLABORATION

Scott: I have quite a few Japanese engineers, Sweden, Britain, we have people coming and working on the project here and going home and so we’ve sort of got the sharing going on all ready but be want to make it more real time distribute around the world.

<SLIDE> LOOKS LIKE THE BASIS FOR A NIC…

Scott: And I… Looking at all these dots and there are countries I haven’t been to yet so… I know for a fact that New Zealand and Australia are going to sign up as soon as I go and tell them. But there are a lot of other places. Ah… If it looks like the basis of developing a NIC of people around the world interested in disability and aging and the technology that goes with it.

<SLIDE> A MODEL FOR INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION

Scott: The model that I evolved here is share existing knowledge, get funding, seems to come up all the time, perform academic research by tying in the universities, perform applied technology research by have the places look beyond how do we take the research and make it practical. There is no point in doing it if you don’t disseminate it and deliver it and then share the new working knowledge and this is where the feedback comes in.

<SLIDE> ROAD MAP FOR REGIONAL ARCHIMEDES RESEARCH CENTER

Scott: Is that… In this diagram I have here which I use as a road map of when I talk to people about is, I’ve deliberately duel Archimedes project. We’re just… In fact we’ve finished signing the papers today for starting a Archimedes international which will become the umbrella organization to tie this all together. I deliberately did this two half circles so that it folds back on itself because the feedback but…

<SLIDE> ROAD MAP FOR REGIONAL ARCHIMEDES RESEARCH CENTER

Scott: If you run down there you know, it’s all the things I just said and just to get you an idea where we’re at I haven’t, I keep joking with the people that if I get anymore people I got to get a bigger computer.

<SLIDE> CURRENT KNOWLEDGE

Scott: But this is to give an idea of the network of the different groups that are all ready involved in just what we’ve been doing so far. Archimedes Cairo is actually starting. We’ve got one in Isuka City in Japan is starting. We’ve got several others that are, they are getting the money together to start up and so on. So I see this as a real tangible example of where people can get involved in doing something that has a very good outcome. It’s not comparative in the sense that oh I can’t work with you because my boss won’t let me share any of the stuff I know. So I’m going to go straight to the last page here which is next Thursday.

<SLIDE> INVITATION TO SPECIAL MEETING

Scott: I thought since all you’ve all been coming at 4:00 on Thursdays, next Thursday anyone who is interested in the possibility of an ongoing involvement and thinking things through you’re invited to have a…. to a station at Cordura Hall which is at the other end of Panama St. back by Campus towards the medical center. Purpose is to develop way to develop a global DKR that looks at technologies related to disability and aging. And the thing that I see is that we’re all going to need it. And I don’t know whether you want to use it as a forum to get the people who maybe interested in the technical side of it. You know we’ve got a lot of room there we can share it; spread out if people are to. So anyway 4:00, next Thursday, don’t break the Patton just come here subconsciously and other side of the street.

Engelbart: There’s something about the idea of collaboration. You get bright guys together and things can happen. So I just want to mention one thing that I really like to work on is being able to give demonstrations. I’d like to be able for instance, demonstrate the augment system. I’d like to see demonstrations of other things. But I’d like to capture them in ways in which they are a part of an archive so you can point to any you know… Anyway, you can link into them. So, we’re trying to find someway in which we can give some demo of augment for instance and it takes a long time to show it all. But if we could just to get it on the archives so if anybody’s interested, let me know. And meanwhile I don’t want us to be late for all this … this hoopla and I just want tell you this has been a real experience and I hope it isn’t the last I see of you. At least I’ll see you at the reception and thank you for coming.

-END ProEd001 Engelbart 2/2-