Day 3 The opening day of the World
Library Summit. Doug delivered the opening keynote in the morning on the
topic of Knowledge Augmentation for the 21st Century to an audience of
almost 1000 delegates, speakers and dignitaries. Following the speech,
during the break the Minister of Information, Technology and the Arts David Lim said to Doug
that it was a heroic effort to cover an enormous amount of deep material
greatly relevant to the audience in 45 minutes. Bill and Mei Lin in
subsequent conversations with attendees, observed that it appeared to be
very well received by the audience of library representatives, primarily
from SE Asian libraries, with a sprinkling of North American and European
attendees. It was a funny thing, but because Doug was talking as a
technology visionary to a primarily librarian audience, his talk seemed to
be taken as a message from the mainstream of technology and they, the
audience were hugely appreciative of what they perceived as the movement
back to human-centric computing. I think we've gained a lot: In the best
case, many of the librarians are going to go back to their libraries and be
much more purposeful about their defining their role in relation to
technology and will undoubtedly cite Doug as giving them their awakening
call. Great stuff.
Abstract of Doug's talk: The rate of technology innovation threatens
to tear our social fabric. Dr. Douglas Engelbart esxamines the new
developments that strain the ability of goverments, libraries and other
social institutions to bridge the digital divide. The key Dr. Engelbart
offers to re-establish the balnce is facilitated evolution of complex
organisations' ability to share and use knowledge. Not just an abstact
concept, DDr. Engelbart describes a rich human-centreic evolutionary
framework, which harnesses innovative use of new technology to augmnet human
capability. Dr. Engelbart outlines the "Bootstrapping" methodology and
proposes a role for world library organizations as leaders in knolwedge
augmentaiton for the 21st century.
We had lunch hosted by Dr. Tan Chin Nam, the
Permanent Secretary of the Ministry for Information, Technology and the Arts
at the best Indian restaurant in Singapore. Mei Lin had to dash off before
dessert to chair Plenary II National Knowledge Agenda's. In opening the
Plenary, she observed " It is a measure of the civilization of a society the
things they being to hold sacred. ..... I have lived in the US for over
twenty years, but I am from Singapore. It gives me enormous pride to see
Singapore host a World Library Summit and develop a Plenary on the topic of
National Knowledge Agenda." Speakers representing Australia, Germany and the
UK spoke about the state of the art in their
countries. That evening, the WLS gala
dinner was held. The evening opened with an impressive volley of intense
drumming by about a dozen gentleman in traaditional Malay costume. It
sounded very much like the Japanese Taiko drumming but at a constantly
faster paste. We were served an 8 course Chinese Banquet style dinner of
food from the Malay Muslim cuisine. Many librarians wore their national
dress from Thailand, the Phillipines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Indonesia,
Burma, Cambodia and Laos. It was a colorful evening in which we were
entertained by a string quintet over dinner, which struck me as very
"library-like" in nature. The attending Minister was Dr.
Vivian Balakrishnan, who sat next to Charles Goldfarb, also here as a
keynote speaker, who was next to Bill. Doug excused himself to prepare for
the long day he was to have on Day 4. Bill was struck by the multi-faceted
nature of Dr. Balakrishnan who is in charge of public works and buildings in
Singapore. He is also an eye surgeon who practices one day a week. He still
does his job as Dean of the Medical School at the National University of
Singapore, and not content with this, he had a conversation with Charles
Goldbarb on ebXML and XML, which Charles felt reflected an extraordinarily
high level of understanding. Bill and Charles were humbled by the
experience. It didn't help that he was also extraordinarily handsome noted
Mei Lin with a grin!Day
4Off we went to Nanyang Technology University, at the western end of
the island, where Doug delivered the lecture at the Information Management
Research Center to a very interested audience of faculty members. It struck
a chord with any of them and they observed that Doug's framework provided a
great integration of their many point areas of research. They are interested
in further collaboration with Bootstrap. We will be meeting up again on
Saturday before Doug and Bill leave for the US, to see what we might do
specifically together. Then it was back to the city
center for Doug to deliver the inaugural IDA Distinguished Speaker Lecture
to an audience of IT and telecom senior management. The topic was a
Framework for Innovation. They kept asking Doug, what does it take to be
innovative. The answer which finally struck home was "A willingness to be
embarrassed". He told them about the series of rejections and setbacks
he'd had, and how he continued on despite. Eventually when years after his
intuition was validated, he continued to be rideculed for the next series of
ideas. It is hard to be ahead of your time.The picture he left was one of
great personal courage and conviction. People were awed and moved by his
humility. That evening, he was
interviewed by two television channels, CNBC Asia and Channel News Asia.
They asked about the mouse. One asked how he rated the odds of convincing
people about the path he was advocating. He said that he felt so strongly
that this is something he had to do, that it was worth advocating, even if
it only saved human kind 1 month or 1 year in getting to harness technology,
because the increase in capabilities possible by what he was talking about
was a 2-5 fold increase, and would make a real difference to humanity.
So he doesn't think about the odds. He must do what he must
do.After such a day, how else could we end it than by walking over to
the Raffles Hotel and drinking Singapore Slings and having a perfect dinner
under the moon in the Raffles courtyard with live Brazilian music
playing?