Doug Engelbart's    Colloquium at Stanford

An In-Depth Look at "The Unfinished Revolution"

Welcome to session eight of the "Unfinished Revolution" Colloquium that we are holding here. This session is entitled Pilot Outpost of the Frontier. That frontier has a special meaning that we will review. During the day we are going to go though different aspects that we talked about  before, trying to tie it in with high performance. The high performance in knowledge work, and leading to the high performance that is in all sorts of  capabilities. 

Fundamental challenge in the bootstrapping sense is to develop an optimal, evolutionary environment for organizations and they are saying that a lot of change is coming forth for organizations. A lot of change in their environments. A lot of change in what they are going to have to adapt to.  And change in the way they can work. So these multiple levels of change are coming about so the evolutionary environment is what we really have to  focus on. 
 

So we used the term social organisms in referring to organizations of almost any size to help get oriented about the evolutionary concept for that. The evolutionary process gets better and better at determining which direction represents improvement. It is a lot of years in evolving these sorts  of things; so some of the concepts don't really seem to fit in other people's framework about this. 

One of the things that we want to remind everybody about is that we have been talking about the co-evolution about the tool system and the human system. Each of those is a quite complex system in itself. Their co-evolution is what has to happen. That you don't just get driven by the  technologies, especially so you don't get driven by technologies automating what we used to do because their are going to be so many changes  brought about through our society. Changes in the way we work those processes are going to change, so they are going to want to look at the new  ways to change processes. The ways of thinking and working so that you can better harness the new options of the technology. That is one of the  things. 

Simple-minded you could put up two dimensions of tool system and human system. Although each is a multidimensional vector. So you don't just get just a plane when you try to position any given organization in what degree of how far out in the tool system did they use, how far up in  the human system are they employing. You can make a rough guess that our societies through out the world are distributed something like this. 

In the evolution for all the years has been such that was some boundary that people could anticipate the way the technologies were going to emerge over the coming decade or so. Same with the way organizations could, so evolution was slow, and a lot of it organic. 

This is what we assume is the thing which we are facing now with the technology that is explosive. It may not be all the way out there now, but already you can anticipate things that are going to be available technically and how are you going to harness them? New options for the way that  people work together, think, etc. So there is this big frontier. We call it the co-evolution frontier because this is what has to happen. You have to work  your way not just over here and up here, but evolving through there. This is the challenge. 
 

There isn't anybody who is going to be able to say exactly where we are going to go. This where you belong out there in that space. It is an evolutionary process because there is so much complexity of inner reacting kind of evolution change. The best that we could do is to provide an  environment, which evolution can take place in ways that give the maximum ways in which natural adaptation and evolution can take place. With in  that, nobody knows exactly where you are going to be, because it is too complex. No dictators, no monopolies. In some sense you say if what is it that  going to change like that and need to evolve. Make an analogy. How did our cooking and taste in food evolve? How would they evolve if they were  one restaurant in the world? They just have one market place and that keeps them happy enough, etc.that is all there is to it, unless you have a lot them  of evolving, trying things, communicating, and people finding out what is going on. 

So every social organism in order to evolve needs the best visibility of what is happening in the world, what is likely to happen, what other organizations of it's similar nature are doing. So that it can decide and start maneuvering and evolving. There is a lot of clustering and moving. The best  thing to provide an evolutionary environment is to maximize the visibility both of the guesses of what is happening ahead, and case studies and  assessments of what is going on today. Also, the options that are there in experiments and how to integrate good ideas so they have a chance to get  forward. If these things get caught up with proprietary hooks on things it would be sort of be like proprietary hook that would be like the only way you  could get a restaurant would be to buy the whole thing from one vendor. Some thing has to evolve in that sense and it is an interesting challenge. 

So one of these things that comes up, this concept of very high performance organizations. We are assuming that the organizations are going to get much higher in their performance. This is saying that if they don't get higher in their collective ability to cope with complex problems, we are in troubles.  So that is the evolution we need to provide in order to help evolve organizations that are smart enough to cope with the complexity that is going to  come with that. My orientation begins as an engineer. You need to build prototypes and try them, fly them, and test them. Assess them, improve, and  rebuild them, etc. so this is evolution of real working organizations. 
 

So way back in the sixties about this...our laboratory is going to use it, we live on it every day and make it work better and better for us. Then by 1974 we started in order for the same thing to get real organizations, not just the laboratory and research institute, we started selling service over the  arpa-net for people. We made the contract with them in such a way that we actually had a B person assigned. We formed a community of them, so we  called it the knowledge workshop architect. So the community was called the knowledge workshop architect community. Then everybody told me, you  know what the acronym for that is nobody will like that, it's QUACK. 

The community in fact loved it. The chairman nominated himself as king quack. The cooperation among them was very interesting. We started talking about the things that they would like to see improved. One guy says, my boss said that I could get an extra thirty thousand dollars; I could plunk into  the kitty to do some improvement of this. What should we do? So the other groups said this is what we really like, they all talked it over and the one  guy said ok, let's do that. The kind of cooperation. It was just beginning to take off when our world shut on us. Never in the commercial world can we  get that kind of cooperation. The commercial owners of our system were telling us no, no, don't do that. You guys are from some ivory tower, and all  they'll do out there is want us to spend money improving the system. If we shut down that kind of user group, then they will be quiet. What we learned  was that you really need to build and try and evolve. You really need multiple units that are evolving in their own way, with a lot of communication  between them so that we can all look over there and see. Instead of being closed and saying that I am going to have one up on them. If you flounder  because you didn't know that someone else already tried that, and it didn't work or why. This is the kind of thing engineering: build, fly, test; research:  study, analyze, understand; engineering: build, fly, test; There would have not been any other way we would have gotten this space but built and tried,  and done lots of assessment and analysis, but have to build and try. 

If we are going to populate undersea with undersea domes, well, you can't go far with people who are going to go down in swimming pools and learning to live in little domes under there. No, you have to build real ones; with people down they're really carrying out their full life and what they are  going to do. So let's build them and make them work. This is the case here. This is what we get in the frontier. 

We really need outposts. We really need real life organizations that are trying to do this. General Motors, why don't you move way out there and try and do this. Obviously there are practical problems in moving big organizations. Yet the little ones teaching you what. To weigh around this, there are strategic concepts like that. 
 

Let's call them High-Performance Augmented Teams. They are specially equipped, specially trained, specially recruited, specially targeted capabilities, and specially deployed. In order to get that, I don't think it is enough to say that we have this team of engineers over there and we are  going to turn them into a high performance team. The kind that I am talking about is I am a navy seals or something like that. I want something where  they really stretch to try to do something. Need them to be recruited for the task. Specially equipped, specially trained. Then the question of how do  you put it to work? 

You have seen this picture before. It says capability infrastructure. We are going to turn some group of people into a high performance team. So what is going to change in this picture? The same picture can represent a high performance team. We need to have some feelings for where we are  going to change things. You can do some things just having team spirit training. Things like that. The co-evolution needs some evolutionary things  happening in both sides. So you can get some unusual things going on in there to get started. Later today I would like to get through the framework  that we have been generating among us to say how we could get started to do something like that. 
 

Assuming it is, they're another thing that you are going to create a high performance team. So how best to invest in creating and using them. So that answer is put them so that they can work closely and usefully with important parts of the real working organization. This we watched and  learned about too. So it is an important consideration because this will provide working day visibility to other people in the organization as to what this  high performance can do. So they should be able to witness things happening and spurring them to upgrade their own capabilities. So we will talk a  little later actually having capability ratings. This is something that we have learned about and watched. 

I am not skill full enough with the graphics to say I am going to build something that says the core knowledge work proficiency for any given individual distributed across the organization. So you know it is going to slant. So it is going to be some kind of curve there. I didn't know how to draw  it in power point. It is going to be declining. So you are going to lift the whole organization at once. So where are you going to lift them too? It would  cost a hell of a lot to move them very far out with in the organization. If you don't have a good idea of where you are going to move them it is going to  be a huge amount to spend. So here is the idea of getting a small group that is going to be working with in the organization. That is going to be a  prototype that is pushed out there. Nothing I have pictured or watched or observed is equal to this. Go to a conference on GroupWare and they say we  have this really neat system for people to work together. So we had five or six graduate students work on a project together three afternoons a week,  and this is all of the data a that we took. I'd look at that and think, only three years that we had of an experience like that we just learned that there is so  much going on with in the organization that that is not going to tell you that you can get that system and plug it in at some place. 

There are several ways that you can start evolving. You can say I can move the whole system by introducing e-mail. That will pull the whole system up. If I really want to go for high performance, I could start with the high performance augmented support teams. That is the way my head has  moved. We are not going to augment the whole design team. We are going to put a support team in the middle. That is going to help them significantly  do their knowledge work by being a support. 

The one thing that we could do is expanding that until eventually the whole design team is in that mode. Or we can start replicating that, and move it down to the marketing team. I even got approached by the people who were auditing, and they said we have a complex job. Well I didn't realize that, but  I guess yet you do. So the auditing teams could be augmented to high performance. The marketing teams, the strategic planning teams. So you have  other places to put these high performance augmented support teams. That to me is a significant thing. It is so central to really learning how to make an  evolutionary environment that I cannot imagine not looking at that. 

This may look familiar this diagram. In this case it represents a large parent organization in which you are going to harness a high performance support team. Some capability down inside the capability infrastructure is where I am going to plug in my team. Where? It warrants an  explicit goal and role in there. It is a good thing to do. I am going to keep plaguing you guys with this basic diagram, because it so centrally represents a  lot of the things. 

If you think about all of the things going on inside the capability infrastructure of any big organization. I could put something in here you realize that some capabilities own a few levels often gets drawn upon by the higher levels capabilities that depend upon them. That is what  infrastructure means. That strategic issue inside our organization, what jobs will they do? 
 

So a strategic answer is process facilitation and knowledge integration within in the organizations dynamic knowledge depository. So, example pay off. It is going to be such that we had it even by 1974 and certainly today that a high performance helper can connect and share screens  and show you how to do something. You can watch and see how much faster that they do things. You can see that they have this whole thing of some  kind of macros or something. These things belong to a category of capabilities that are several grades above that rating of what you have now. You can  work your way up to it, in about four or five months. You can take the next course or something. It is like peddling on my bicycle and someone swishes  by on a car. That is mobility. So the mobility and the capability manipulate a portray things. It has a huge amount of progress to be made. A claim like  that is one of the problems. How do you get people to get some type of perception about how much change there could be? I keep trying to make some  examples of some of that. 

We have seen from the shared screen kind of thing that people can call us from any place in the country, and the trainer can connect with them and says let me see your screen. The trainer says now show me what you were doing. There are other ways. If you pass me the controls I will show you  how to do it. So they pass the controls, talk it though and show how they do it. It is a terrific way of facilitating people that they start learning. It is  amazing how many people, if we are having a training class, a lot are climbing to come. They come into our lab during the training and they would watch  how other people worked. Then they would come back in the lab and say they were doing things that I never heard of before. They are using a  higher-grade user interface. We were giving you the beginner's vocabulary. The whole class rebelled. No, we want the real thing. If we had not shown  them the difference and started them out with the beginners, they wouldn't have objected and been Gun ho. If we just lay in on from the outset saying  look at all of the verbs and nouns everything. It is an important thing for them to see. 
 

The bootstrapping too. It is a strategic thing about giving them dynamic knowledge depository support. If you have some operational, advanced prototype, high performance augmented support teams, where do you use them? Our best investment leverage would be supporting our  capability improvement infrastructure. Is a bootstrapping strategy. There are a number of things. We are going get in to dialogue. 
 

Going in to these dynamic knowledge repositories, there are these special focus groups. Intelligence collection and analysis regarding external events and trends of concern. Very important basic one. Scenarios regarding future trends of concern. The current state of the internal  capability infrastructure and improvement that are planning. We have to have that under control. Current relations with customer, suppliers, partners,  and improvement planning. New products and services. There are quite a few domains of specialized knowledge that many organizations that dynamic  knowledge repositories must keep up on. One of the critical ones that we keep talking about in the improvement infrastructure, are these first three. We  are going to get some special discussion about that. If you have a team that is going to help you with dynamic repositories. You need to realize that any  large organization really has nested dynamic repositories. 

Here is the engineering or the sales, marketing, financial etc. Each of those groups has to have it's own way to operate. This is what we have been seeing. And yet the whole has to have one. This brings about a strong need for concurrency in the evolution of them. It also says, where in there  would you plug in some higher performance dynamic knowledge repository support? That is a very good question. This is one of the strategic issues  that are there to work on. This is why we said earlier put them into the improvement infrastructure. If you are going to do effective bootstrapping, you  need effective dynamic knowledge repository capabilities. You have to learn how to do this better, and you have to learn how to apply that to our  capability-improvement capability. This needs to be a core part of what the NICs (network improvement communities) help their member organizations  improve. NICs are there, they are operating. They have members that are joined together with the C energy to say what is going on. What its NIC can  do for its members is a very important way to help them see how they can use dynamic knowledge repositories to see how they can improve  themselves. It is a basic bootstrapping thing, before they start working on other capabilities that the members say that they want. I want better  communications with my customers or I want a better source of leather for the shoes that I am building. Those other capabilities need attention too, but  the one that has strategic leverage is the capabilities to improve. The core of that is the collective IQ with the CoDiak capabilities, and the core of that is  the dynamic knowledge repository. 

Effective scenario capacity. For the scale and rate of change that the Unfinished Revolution needs to prepare for, this knowledge product part of the DKRs of the many critical social organisms needs the best possible up to date look ahead scenarios. How to do that is very important. We have a talk prepared by Rod Swigart. 

We have had these basic pictures of what a DKR would be since the early 80s. So some of our papers on our website actually describes that. One of them talks about special kinds of communities. Mission oriented communities, and discipline oriented communities. Like an individual, a community  would have a community knowledge workshop. If they are distributed it has to be a knowledge workshop with special characteristics. Because  distributed knowledge work is going to be so critical, to all of the issues that we are talking about, that is going to be a central point. 

I'll just introduce the next speaker, Norman McEachron, from SRI who is going to be talking about benchmarking. 

Welcome back to the second half of session 8. What I think we will do right away is introduce Marcelo Hoffmann who will describe some of the activities associated with doing intelligence collections. He has being working in business and intelligence for five or six years now. He also has  been very active in running the colloquium. Here is Marcelo Hoffmann. 

Engelbart: We only have two of our victims left, so I'd like to take a few minutes and get some dialogue and questions. My question is in both cases you guys were doing things for clients. You have to go out and sell it to the clients. The kind of thing that I am picturing that would be different is that  is part of the business of a NIC and especially of a MetaNIC is to keep watching the future and keep doing the intelligence work, so that they are likely  if they want help, to come to you. Could you stand such a difference? Or else another thing assumable what they would like to be doing is start  evolving better processes, methods, and tools, by which organizations can do that kind of work. So organizations say why don't we do it and you  coach us. So otherwise it is like saying how much value could high performance support teams be to what you guys do. 

Audience: I don't personally go out and sell to the clients. So what I get is kind of a backstage view of it. I suspect there is a kind of inertia about designing the research in order to sell it to the clients. Then trying to figure out a way to go and do what you want anyway. Then convince the clients  that that is what they wanted all along. Maybe I am being cynical. I think in a way, when you are talking about the future, companies and it is usually a  group inside the company isn't sure what they want to know because it is in the future. Unless it is a specific project in which they want to develop  some. 

Engelbart: We are talking about what a NIC is, it is a bunch of organizations saying we are going to work together to, among other things, to keep a better idea on the future. They have already come together in order to pool resources to do this sort of thing. 

Audience: I think in fact that is what the clients of the institute are. They are looking for that. 

Audience: I think my experience is somewhat similar, but with a slight bend. That regardless to whether you do it on purpose or not, within an organization or outside, there is always a client and usually, they tend to give you answers that don't quite match with what you expected before hand  and you present stuff like prototype. People are like that is really nice, and you come back a month from now...oh but we wanted something else. So  often times our clients don't know what they want. They agree to things that they haven't approved of and vice versa. It is really problematic. I wish  that we had a better way of understanding what clients want. More in the consumer arena sort of do we buy the shoes, or do we not buy the shoes. In  terms of the capabilities and doing this in a feedback loop of sorts, it is also very problematic that the feedback loops are not defined. You never know  exactly what you get back. 

Engelbart: Anyone have some questions for a few minutes. 

Audience: Marcelo, the point that you made about the people that pays or not pays, may have different needs then the people who are actually going to use. Can you expand on that? That is something I have seen in lots of different places. The decision makers, maybe because they are so  disconnected from the actual work that is going on. 

Hoffmann: It is a good question. What we have found is the whole issue that Norm mentioned about alignment is often times nowhere near as clear once you get into the details as from the top level. Senior mangers assume that the whole corporation is aligned. What we have found is- not  necessarily. Particularly when we go at low to middle levels, often times there are almost opposite goals and opposite views. For us, looking at this from  a psychographics perspective, often what the senior manager wants is a summary. What the operational person wants is much more detail. And the  lowest person, say an engineer in the design stage, wants all the data that is possible to be gotten from the world. How do you engage what kind of  package, when you sell to multiple buyers? It is really problematic. Often times, somebody approves and then other person doesn't like. It goes back  and forth. It's really not just about money but it is understanding what is useful. 

Audience: I am reminded about that old saying. Chickens don't buy chicken feed, farmers do. 

Audience: I was wondering if you find in the new media, any solutions to that problem. In that through linkages and layers, and having the ability of a graphic organizer and with in that it links to a summary, and that in turn can link to in depth information, if you are beginning to use that. If that  somehow addresses those issues. 

Audience: We are experimenting with that, and trying to find different ways of shaping the reports and information so that it is accessible at different levels. We had a meeting on it the other day, and we have a lot of ideas coming out about how to do that. There are so many different learning  strategies and needs that people have. In finding some different way to tailor that information to meet all of the different clients needs in a non-trivial  problem. Maybe storytelling is the answer here. 

Engelbart: I think those are just examples of what the knowledge environment is going to be in the future. What does an organization need, what are the different divisions, projects, and parts of it need. Are going to be changing, and the business about being able to generate usable knowledge as it  shifts, and portray it, is going to be more universal. It has to be a continuing thing. It may or may not be something that outsource like this. I think we  will move on. 

Audience: I just had one anecdote, and it has to do with the whole knowledge management issue. It is a story I love. It is a very large consumer products company that was denied a paten, on the grounds that they already owned it. 

Audience: There is a question that this discussion prompts in my mind. That is do we have to be thinking about storing knowledge in lots of different ways? Taking the time to actually put the knowledge away in different forms so that different people can retrieve it and understand what it is about, or  do we think we are clever enough to have the viewers change it into the form that people need. 

Engelbart: That is such a general problem. I don't think you have to lay it on them. 

Audience: Basically you are providing different views. Stories vs. neat little chats, vs. reports and things. In the disability field we have the problem of  converting information that was meant for a graphical user interface into a form that works for blind people. It is a huge job. It would be a lot easier if  there were a word version of it. 

Hoffmann: I think the way that we are trying to deal with this is put what used to be our reports, documents, on the web and assume that is accessible by everyone. From there we are seeing how many of our clients want what and then we start doing that on talking basis. Presentations, conversations  and so on because it is too expensive in a formal, organized fashion until we have enough. Say half of our clients want it this way. Then we optimize it  and go with that. Otherwise the whole issue of conversion is really problematic. Ideally if there was a way to do it with XML, and then turn the knob  and make it graphic or make it textual. Stories or something but I don't know anything along the horizon that is going to do this in any easy way yet. 

Engelbart: Thank you for bringing that up. When I use the terms portrayal and views that are what we have to be more flexible about generating, that is the kind of thing I mean. That is the kind of thing high performance support teams can fly in and say I'll do that for you. That is a little downstream. 

Audience: I don't think it is an opposition between stories and graphics. They are mutually supportive. What is happening is that there is a real shift in the way information is organized initially. So that instead of going into formal reports that can be fifty, sixty, seventy pages long, it's broken up into  what I call NITs narrative units. They are small things that can be hyper textually linked back and forth. I think that is changing way people are thinking  and experiencing even literature for example. This is going to have a big impact. It is going to come in a new generation that thinks this way, as opposed  to the formal essay structure that we are all used to. 

Audience: The problem that we are experiencing at the moment is we did the blind over. Now the multimedia is making life really difficult for deaf people because information was always available in the printed form. Now a lot of the key information is being presented in a verbal form. There is no  translation of it so we have to develop technologies to do that. I bring up the question, should we as a society be thinking that we need to have  different views for different cognitive labels, for different perceptual labels? 

Engelbart: Absolutely. Further more, things are moving faster and a lot of things we can't spoon-feed important people. They have got to get in and be learning all the time. Then we all think that the learning system is going for the K-12 and Universities, etc. but that is going to be continually. Everybody  has got to keep learning. How do you provide for that is important. Your dynamic knowledge repository essentially needs in a way to sort of be flexibly  adaptable for whatever learning techniques there are for grabbing, showing, digesting, and testing. So it is evolving together. That is a good example to  bring up. I have some things I have been wanting to dig out too. It has been a problem for me. I show diagrams and make statements, but I don't know  how they hit you. I am going to try something here. I have five slides of which you have seen before. I would like to spend a few minutes with each one  and say what kind of questions and comments about these come from you guys. Here is the first one. 

Engelbart: I would enjoy hearing some questions or comments. What do you see when you look at this? I think it is so rich. 

Audience: One of the first things I see is I want to know more about those different tool systems and human systems. Do you have to drill down deeper to see what they consist of and how they interact. 

Engelbart: Are you by any chance an engineer? Now I want somebody to ask about this left side too. 

Audience: I meant the human system also, both sides. 

Engelbart: I got some good interactions in just the last year from people trying to go down inside that. Also in the middle. What is a capability infrastructure like with in the organization? What are the capabilities up high, what are they depend upon. It sort of spreads down like this. Down at the  medium to low there are some basic ones about how people write, talk, communicate, and interact and things like that. Those are things that are going to  get affected tremendously in the future. When they get affected like that, it is going to mean the layers above them in the infrastructure would adapt to  harness that. It is because such fundamental things down low in that infrastructure will be impacted so heavily if we really look at how our knowledge  work, our thinking, and our collaborating and going to change. That changes a lot and it goes down into the way that you are going to harness, sense,  actuate, and perceive. What goes on in your head both conscious and unconscious is going to shift a lot. It is just a very good lesson to learn as you  watch how you operate through different kinds of activities. What kind of unconscious skills you have that had to develop. 

Audience: It is implicit in your structure, but I just wanted to make explicit- that our culture tends to think of knowledge as what is between our ears, instead of what is between people. It is a relationship between us and the external world. Knowledge is very much a social process. It emerges in a  social dynamic. Like I said that is implicit in there, but it might be good to try to get at it more explicitly. 

Engelbart: I would like to have some working groups get together with me, and as weeks go by really trying to drill down those things. I do it by myself and it runs off the table. 

Audience: I was wondering if you had anything in here about how to deal with failures. Is dealing with failures something in procedures, paradigms, and customs cause it seems to me that when we make our own failures more visible by having a knowledge repository that confronts us with the fact  that we failed? Time and again last week. We have to learn to live with that. It is very uncomfortable for some folks. We need training in living with the  fact that we are really failing a lot more often than we convince ourselves we are. 

Engelbart: These are kinds of things you bring up and are going to get more collaboration. This goes into the unconscious part of the human. How you unconsciously deal with people. How you react and send messages to them, like oh you failed or something. If you are just supportive, let's try again. It  reminds me of my one shot of making an aphorism. Did I tell you about earning thirty five dollars that somehow it fell into the hands of Reader's Digest  and they actually published it there as a footnote someplace. Mine is the rate at which you mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment that  you can tolerate. So maybe we can build that kind of thing into a social sense at a larger scale. There is so much richness through all those things there.  The little funny thing about technology exploding at that right hand column just pervades all through that to make changes. Over and over again today  we are trapped at looking at the technology that is there to kind of automate the kind of things we used to do. I really want to spend some more time  drilling down in there to say there are things one can do about how technology and people can work together that would start to make a real difference.  That is something I would like to toss up to people too. Before that I have a few more of these. 

Audience: What are those capability infrastructures that have been identified so far? Is that published anywhere? 

Engelbart: Sometimes when people pat me on the back and give me awards, I think that there is really so much that is left to do. I don't know how to do a lot of it. We need to collaborate. That's a dirty word I know. That is why we need an evolutionary environment. 

Audience: Speaking of stories, when we analysis things so far, eventually they get a little bit fuzzy. Many of the things that.... the stories.... our culture and many cultures are built on are really myths of various kinds. I don't mean myths in that they are untrue, but perhaps symbolic stories in many  cases. Someone who is very famous for pursuing this was Joseph Campbell. Where he made studies across different cultures, and across different  times, to try and extract what might be almost cultural invariance for different types of societies. If we are going to look at this sort of thing, it might be useful to read some of his writings or see some of his videotapes. 

Engelbart: When you start looking at some of these things, there is a term, we use CoDiak. We are trying to identify the core set of capabilities to be collectively smarter. The middle initial I for integration is just a terrific challenge. There are all of these kind of things that people have generated and  come up with over the years, that some how they have to get integrated. So we can integrate them in to sort of useful body of understanding and  knowledge. I look at some of the books out there, and the situation is only going to get worse. So really striving to find out how we collectively can do  that integration into applicable forms is terribly important. Every time I hear about something like that. When people are putting things on our form, Eric,  here just pours out book like things, so pretty soon I am going to challenge him. Who better to start integrating that? It is an extremely important  capability and it is going to take focus to do that. 

Engelbart: Let's go to a second slide that you see a lot of. What does this do for people? It is a very important one in my framework. For a few years I was a young aspiring professor at Berkeley, and I began realizing that everybody that has been to very much schooling has that face. They bring up a  question and they look just interested enough just awake enough so that you won't call on them and think that they are asleep, but not enough to be  called on. Suddenly we get that professional student face out there. 

Audience: The thing I like in this diagram whenever I see it is all of those inter connections. You call out the concurrency, that you really are going to be doing all of these things at the same time. One of the questions that I have is I keep looking at the little ones under there, what is going on  underneath that supports these pieces. When I look at the dialogue that has been going on in the on-line discussion and how you take that and make  that into a real DKR. What does that take? What do we really need to do to support that recorded dialogue, and intelligence collection, and knowledge  products? Especially when you think about some of Neil's concerns for other people with differing capabilities. Is that all happening under here? What  does that take for us? How do we do that? 

Engelbart: It has been done organically, slowing, in imperfect ways for a long time. As the world is changing that is part of the scaling thing that you put attention to before. The issues are going to be more complex, happening faster. We have got to have; we will fall apart if we don't find a better way  to manage. Then I put CoDiak down as the challenge for that. What is this knowledge products box mean to you? 

Audience: I am noticing that what you are not making clear is that the DKR has to be contributed to by everybody. Everybody is an author in this. If you have a meeting and you don't put it into a DKR, your personal knowledge repository about what happened at that meeting, it's gone. You have to  collect it. If you can collect it you can share it quite effectively. You have seen Rod Welche's. 

Engelbart: That is part of recorded dialogue in my book. What is going to be valuable from the interactions between in your own notes in fact? 

Audience: The point that Rod makes is that you have to go back over your appointments for today. Say what it was that happened and what needs to happen next in each of those things. 

Engelbart: Great. That is integration. Then you also have your intelligence collection what is happening there. So the dialogue is in the intelligence box that is coming in. The knowledge product box over here is a current summary status. That is where you're applicable. 

Audience: My main point is that this is not something that somebody can do for you. 

Engelbart: Well that is right. Everybody has to be a part of it. That is what the concurrency part is. You have to concurrently be doing your part while your team is doing its. The project will develop like that. That concurrency thing, integration. That is tough, but the concurrency one is the real  challenge. That is the kind of thing that leads us to say that we can't have violence. You can't have these guys are using Microsoft and these are using  Lotus notes, therefore they are islands. This is why the standards for the way documents and communications are have to evolve. Then the evolution  of that has to be a lot more than just what comes out every two years as a next version. So the evolutionary process for the whole thing to grow is part  of it. The knowledge products we used to call the handbook. Then people started objecting well that is too much. Then during some of the meetings  people said why don't we start calling it the encyclopedia. It's got the same sense to it, where you go find what it is you need to know about the current  state. If there are given issues flying around like that, what is the current state? If you are not quite sure on that you should be able to backtrack the  steps on the issue development of that. The back link management is extremely important in there. 

Audience: So do you have a list of twenty or thirty of these DKRs that are analyzed for how good and effective they are? 

Engelbart: No. That is what I was going to get Norm do, but he left. It is one of the things that needs doing in the improvement infrastructure, is to learn how to give the kind of rating and benchmarking. How well is this being done and it would be terrific when it starts going downstream, and you say this advertises that it is going to be doing all kinds of things in it's products for people. It rates very low internally for doing this, so how come they are  telling us what to do? Individuals, rating individuals need to have. Things are changing rapidly. You can't say hey I good grades in high school, what  the hell. Think of benchmarking and having ratings so that you know where you rate. If you come to work some place and they look at these different  categories. Your general knowledge management is just that you have not upgraded. That sort of rating that you had the fourth class two years ago,  well that is fine, but things have moved on. In order for you to keep up with your peers you are going to move yourself up some notches. 

Jon: I would like to follow up on that question. A concern I have about this picture is the implied amount of overhead. Not just the matter of making all of us responsible for what got said, but also this relates to Neil's question earlier to make that information useful you need to add information to it.  Meta-information. To provide hook, links, and summaries. I've never seen a system where that can be provided automatically. To me it boils down to a  philosophical question, of where does meaning come from anyway? It seems to keep coming back to the meaning has to come from the people. This  relates to what Neil asked because with the nearsighted people...the reason things are so flat is because there's information, organized, hierarchical,  logical, information being conveyed visually by an the special organization of things on a page. That isn't going to come through in the bare text.  Adding that information, you always get an added twenty, forty percent effort. My problem with this is that, to make this work we actually have to put  more time into the information. What we are being pressed to do constantly is spend less time doing it. I don't understand the way out of the dilemma. 

Engelbart: I get it. That is part of what is going to happen anyway. More complexity, happening more rapidly. How are you going to cope? If you look at that, the big central part of coping is how do you do this integration of innovative ideas, thoughts, and issues, while keeping track of what it is you  need to know to be applicable. It is going to take more overheads. Therefore it becomes more of a team sort of thing. The trade off for that would be  that, as Jeff Wilson likes to talk about boosting your collective IQ. Ten people can do what twenty used to as a team effort. Somehow in there it has to  be done. What are the practices? One of the things I am really interested in is for people to have a discussion. I got one of these speech recognizers and  I want to start training it. What I would like to do next is when I call up someone, or talk to them that they have one of their own. It may be a different  brand, but it works. So there is a network connection between the two, and they fuse into a transcript of your dialogue. You will learn as you go along  like that, how to make tags as you are talking, just as a natural kind of thing. You also have smart agents that you can call on to do things. Today how  do you juggle and use those. The world is going to be more complex and if we are going to survive in a sane and coherent way. A central part of it is the  way you deal with your knowledge. 

Eric: I wanted to reply to what Jon was saying. I think he is absolutely right with the necessity to add information to get value out starts to become a limiting factor. So I think the high leverage point is to work with the information that you are already recording in the form of documents, specifically at  this point. I do think multi-media become important as we go forward. We are already recording design documents, we are already having decisions, and  to the extent that we can capture those and relate them to what we are doing I think we can get a high percentage return for a lower percentage effort.  Certainly not a zero percentage, but lower than trying to track every meeting that I have been to. 

Engelbart: It depends what you mean by tracking. One of the things it would be interesting to do would be to lay out some propositions and see how people vote about what is going to happen some day. Maybe they would bet on it or something. If you look at the automobile transportation, and if you told people a hundred years ago, they maybe wouldn't believe that you could spend that much money on a wagon and that you could travel so far,  things change. I am betting that we will get better at that. A lot of things are going to change. There are things that as you walk along in your day you  will learn to toss of the tanks and the meta kind of stuff, it will just be part of your skill. Instead of just talking and walking away. 

Audience: I want to address part of that also and raise another issue that is related. Part of what you have to consider that is part of the bigger picture, is that the DKR can't necessarily be the end all solution. The person who is actually using the knowledge that is stored with in the DKR has to bring  something to that. Ideally, we want to take all of that information that is stored in people's heads and make it available to others, but maybe realistically  it has to be the responsibility of the person coming in. Looking at the information to understand the context of the information and go discover in other  ways what the context of the information is. People who are looking at design documents and don't understand them, there is that social process, the  human system side. The left side of the previous chart, where people learn things and they read the documents and they discuss it with other people, and it is converted by knowledge, clarifying things that way. 

A comment I wanted to raise that I think is also related, and may refute what I just said, was it's a point that Marcelo made. It is a point that concerns me about this document. It is about context. If in intelligence collection, the context is so important in determining what you are trying to collect, does that  act as an impediment to the scalability of this. In other words, if you are going to take a bunch of DKRs and the DKRs are so contextual in nature is that  going to be useful if you try and group them together? Having other people looking at the information and trying to gather knowledge out of that. 

Engelbart: The feeling I have is because it is going to be such a strenuous job, to do the scenarios and the intelligence collection, that it will be something sensibly shared out there. The larger communities will be doing that just as a matter of course, all the time. 

Hoffmann: I have a comment on that, following up on what you just said. I am reminded of what happened with object-oriented software. At SRI there is a fellow who did a project sometime back looking at winded writing software in the sense of objects. It was cost effective. He found that they had to be  used at least five to ten times before it was worthwhile. It comes back to this. Unless there is sort of a scale up, then the overhead kills you. Once there  is a scale up that is large enough, then the overhead is not that important. The question then is how to get up high enough so that the scaling is  favorable. The problem is how do you start and get enough folks involved with low enough overhead and get all of the benefits. 

Neil: What this suggests when you first talk about it, is that each of those circles is a self-contained law of knowledge about something. If all of us went home and did a report, we would put all of that stuff into our own law, we still haven't accumulated what has happened in this meeting. It still is not  clear who that blob belongs to. Do I belong to many blobs, or do I have a blob around me. That is the thing. I was going to ask the question before Jon  came up and that was my understanding of data base indexing. That implies so much that can never be done unless people put the knowledge into the  correct blob. That is the individual's responsibility. 

Engelbart: You have got something there. It is something that we need to do. I am going to talk about high performance support teams. This is a challenge and I appreciate this kind of dialogue. I have a few more of these slides that are basic like that. Thank you very much Neil. 

Neil: I was fascinated by something I read in a science magazine a while ago, the old factory system is something that is used to make our neurons grow the right place when we are forming. It smells its ways to your fingertips. How do we put our factory nodes into this so that the neurons will smell their way to the right place? 

Engelbart: These are kind of portrayals that help talk about the scale of the challenge. 

Audience: The one thing that occurs to me when I look at this picture is that the knowledge products intelligence collection recorded dialogues in higher levels of the organization. Say we have a group, a division in a company. If you were to take the collection of groups, what's going to make it  useful to see a division is some kind of inference. You have to take the stories learned from each of the individual ones, generalize it to some level and  make it useful for the entire corporation. The marketing people, the engineers, and the sales people are all different cultures but there are interesting  lessons to be learned from each of them. Since they are all from the same pool or division, there has to be some common thing. If you are going to build  one of these things, it seems that you are going to need some facility to cheaply and easily allow people at the division level to create generalizations  that are partially true, partially false. Then support those generalizations with specific cases pointed to the individual DKRs at the level below it. There  are a couple ways of going about doing that. You could annotate them with links; you could annotate the links with who ever created the  generalization, and thought that was interesting. You could use story telling, or the hearsay, or Xerox repair people sitting around and telling war  stories. These are excellent ways of communicating information across organizations that don't have a lot in common. So if you are going to build a  system like this, it seems that you should build the capability of generalization. Then looking at generalizations that may or may not be true, rating them  and then supporting or refuting those generalizations with specific instances at the lower levels. 

Engelbart: I agree. A lot of these things have to be tried and evolve, that is why the evolutionary environment that you have to go after these kinds of things. Not just in one organization, but also out here on a big scale it has to take place. I'd like to go on. 

Audience: Do you really think there are going to be multiple DKRs or one DKR with people usually living in part of it? It seems that one of the problems that comes up is with this alignment question that came up earlier. This generalizing the divisional level. It is not just information flowing up; it's also  those ideas flowing down. When it all gets linked together, it's just one big DKR or multiple ones? 

Engelbart: They all have to be interlinked. Then there are lots of questions dynamically, about say if I link to something that you've got, there has to be some kind of understanding between us about how permanent yours is, the changes, or the access control. We though about the details about these  things, I hoped to give a short presentation about what we would like to kick off early on about something that would be different and could evolve.  This is extremely valuable for me because when I toss these things up, I have the meaning that is built into my mind. So, I put it up there to carry that  kind of meaning, but I don't know how much it carries to other people. I needed this. That is what I put in one slide. You may not need it, but I do. Here  is the second of that and here is the third one. What kind of meaning, questions, and issues does that bring to you? 

Audience: One of the things that comes up is tool system utilization, human system development, it seems like a lot of those things are not yet done. With the tool system, there is the Internet now so there are a lot more capabilities out there now and how do we use them? That might be pushing out  there, yet we don't know how to use them. Human system development, I don't know what has been developed that has not been used. 

Engelbart: That is frontier and explorer. It is really the ones is the green envelope that is used today. How are we going to move out into that space? 

Audience: How much of that on the access is exploring and developing new tools and new human systems, and how much is just simply applying the ones that some one else has made up. 

Engelbart: One thing about the market place that is pretty clever is not putting things on the market that they don't think will sell. All of these outposts are out beyond what you would expect to see the organization using. The necessity of exploring that multi-dimensional space with a lot of things out  there that we can't picture. This is what we talk about with scenarios and case studies. How do we provide a useful picture of what probably off there to  go after? What kinds of new tools, techniques, and processes, customs and skills...all the things in the tools and human system. What one perceives  and assumes how far are the boundaries of the frontier makes a huge difference then in how much they will want to invest in exploring it. This  pervading paradigm is what I'd get the label for what those people think the boundaries are. If they think, we already have the Internet, webs, and  e-commerce, we are practically there. 

Audience: One thing I don't get from this diagram that I hear from the talk. I don't know how to do it visually, but I think it would be worth doing. It is the question about the hope in the stories. We have these ways to go, and we have the outposts. If there is some way to show with an overlay, that  these can evolve and we can go beyond this little green thing so that it can keep moving. The one problem I have with this is that the outposts look  lonely out there. I am kind of going well how can you go out there if we show it is possible to do. If we keep moving these systems, if we keep  co-evolving. It can maybe motivate people to maybe put some energy, money, effort, and commitment, into it knowing that they can get out there and  that there are rewards in doing that. 

Engelbart: So that the thing that they have to create as at least technology tools that potentially can be applied out there. Then how do you put those to work? Then the whole question about where you put them to work so that it is realistic. Then there is the whole thing about every organization that  is going to evolve moving out there, has to get this explicit and implicit kind of feeling and knowledge about where it wants to go. That is all part of it. I  want to start talking about some of the things in the tool system that you can kick off something that is an evolutionary base. The criteria that we are  using for it is that it has to work with what other people are already using. You have to have higher performance capabilities moving around that will do  things with knowledge bases and the web pages that people are not using now. Then you have to give it some time so quite a few people can see it in  that context and you can have an evolution. It doesn't have to wait until it comes out in some big product. So having that evolutionary tool system,  there is no way you are going to get the real evolution unless the tool systems can be evolving. Like the open source provides for now. 

Audience: Hi I am Pete Jacobs. One of the things that occurs to me now as I look at these various charts and the modules of information that we look at in the colloquium, is that it might be helpful to me to see some kind of graph or representation of that space that represents the difference between what  is desired at any given point and what is attainable. I am thinking for example, about a gradient that might start out with something like the unknown,  then go into confusion, then deal with something like conflict. That is present in the things that we have been talking about all along. I am thinking  about even adversarial situations where you have, for example, like the intelligence community that may not want to give up it's authority and power,  and it is hiding behind it's dark cloak. You have governments that might not want to give up power to democratic systems like a DKR, and so forth. If  you had one graph it might serve purposes to help explain all of these others, and some of the questions that have been raised about them. 

Engelbart: I wouldn't even know how to start with that because I don't get the picture. Would you like to help me do something like that? 

Jacobs: I would be glad to help you. Perhaps I haven't been that articulate. I see that seems to be present in all of the things that we have discussed. There seems to be a starting point where we are. We never quite know where we are going because we are involved in an evolutionary system. There is  always a chase going on between the verb and the noun. The lion and the antelope, so to speak. The object oriented software, you could think about it  like that. 

Engelbart: There is a big challenge to me, how do you set up the evolutionary environment that would be the healthiest that you could do? 

Jacobs: I think that the evolutionary environment is the thing that is undefined. It does have certain known characteristics. We tend to use these terms: well we are confused now, where do we go from here, so and so over there disagrees or how do we get from this point to that point, what is it that we  want. Those are all to me, if it ways of saying or defining in vague ways, and sometimes very accurate ways this unknown territory. In some sense, to  me at least, it is a continuity or a string that ties together all of these charts and all of the things that we talk about. It is always present in all of these  discussions, but we never the subject itself. So I find that we are chasing our tails when we say how are we going to get there? We say when we get  there, we will have to figure out what we will do about it, or we will have to figure out a way to get there because it is part of the evolution. So it just  becomes language with out practice without knowing what that terrain really looks like in abstract terms. 

Engelbart: If you can turn it into something more concrete, that is great. The way that I do is that you are painting a space out there, some of these concepts can be used to formulate the basis of what would the strategy be. Part of the strategy has got to be that you have ways to show people, or  satisfy those types of questions. Other than that I don't know how to help. 

Audience: As I look at this co-evolution map, it occurs to me that some of the outposts that we are seeing are what you normally do when you are taking risks. For the human development system, I'll say the evolution of the economic system; the capital market system has tried to do the evolution.  Some of the critique that we have of that market system is that it is not efficient enough to cope with the rate of change of the complexity. I would say  that some of those outposts, some people talk about loneliness or who will pay for it so the factor of how do we make the risks or failures more  teachable to us. People take risks and they fail in the evolutionary system, but the rest of us do not benefit from those failures. People feel that the  capital market is the way that the evolution is taking place. It is a critique of the inefficiency of the system. It gives us something that we have used to  date. How in fact can change economic practices to cope with the problem. That is one contribution I have in the evolution. 

In the tools systems side, the engineering discipline has coped with it very well. For the human system, if you use the terms social engineering, it carries lots of baggage with it. For systematic social evolution. It just has historic baggage and you can't go on that access with out sounding, people don't  like that term social engineering. They are comfortable with the term markets, and capitalism as a way of evolving the social mechanism. I think there is a  sense in which it is a good graph, but the language of talking about them could be a little difficult. 

Engelbart: There have been a few difficulties over the decades in communicating. The longer I stay with this, the more my intuition says it's higher probability. There is another one that if you say out of any organization, there are products that it produces. Knowledge. University people put out  something, or research people put out something, or manufacturing people put out something. What if you divide that set of output into two kinds. One  process. That is a fundamental picture about bootstrapping. If there isn't any feedback like that, then the organization can't do by itself any  bootstrapping. If you join something larger, and start pooling it, you can contribute things that the others can contribute, but among you all can  produce things that can come back and do that bootstrapping. The term bootstrapping has to be tied to what comes back to improve your improvement  process. That is why that picture is there. I hear people use the terms that sometimes make me wince. It's ok for people to generate their own ideas  about what it is, but not if they are trying to echo or say what I have been trying to say. Are there questions about this particular thing? 

Audience: The piece that I don't see is the part that you just said. That is the interaction between the different organizations. I feel like that needs to be 
part of the feedback loop too. 

Engelbart: It is too. I made another one, which had a bunch of these sitting here with various amounts of what could come out. Then they pooled and came back to all of them. It is sort of that coming back to improve your improvement that is the bootstrapping sense. On a national scale if they decided  that we are going to start investing more federal money in boosting the nations improvement infrastructure. First you need to go through and clarify  what that is. That could be a large-scale issue. 

Audience: I think by bootstrapping now you mean establishing a positive feedback loop. That is not completely obvious to everybody. 

Engelbart: Right. That was the first time I heard what a bootstrap was that was called a bootstrap circuit in a radar set. This was just positive feedback. That was there a long time. Somehow trying to identify strategically that if we were going to invest money in trying to improve things, as early as  possible, it would be nice to improve what would improve the improvement process. On a scale like that. If we look at the capability improvement  challenge that is out there with the way that the world is changing and happening. Wow, we really have a challenge. That is one way. 

Audience: Part of this is about developing a clear view. Then I have to caution you never to confuse a clear vision with a short path. 

Engelbart: I actually had a little bit of practical training as an engineer. One of the things I like to distinguish about that. They like to build it to see it work, and then improve it. That reflex in the strategy that I talk about tremendously. The high performance teams are something that you can build and  put them to work. Not to build them and watch them play games or demonstrate that they can jump around pretty flexibly, but really put them to work in  key places. What does this tell you? 

Engelbart: We can move on then. It uses the A, B, C's, and pooling your C resources and so you have an improvement community. If you are really trying to do it in the network way, we will let you use the term NIC. Then we point out that NICs themselves would like to improve. So if they form an  improvement community that is a NIC, then that is a good way for them to bootstrap their way up. That is what we call a MetaNIC and we said that is  going to be a key thing. It is part of a scaleable infrastructure for improving, for bootstrapping. 

Audience: Ray Glocker again. This is going back to number two, the concept of a knowledge product, my remarks are addressed to. In a sense, I am seeing knowledge products as we have traditionally experienced them. As being either something that is relatively static, but attempts to be rather  comprehensive, as connoted by the world encyclopedia, or alternatively is dynamic and on going, and current. It is not particularly comprehensive, but  is a particular point, either a point of research report, or a new point of insight or whatever. Which is connoted by the term journal. Part of the difficulty  is that the encyclopedia or static is by definition, as soon as we hear this comprehensive scheme it's obsolete by the time we start to articulate it's  second sentence. Unless we are willing to go ahead and tolerate an obsolete presentation, we will never get the sense of wholeness. We have these  trade offs in our knowledge products. Either you are obsolete or you are so fragmented that you are not integrated. That is what I like about the CoDiak  concept, because it is an invitation to somehow participate in the experience of both of these knowledge products simultaneously. While we currently  have our encyclopedias that have our seventeenth and eighteenth editions of it, there are more dynamic and current things. When you sight an Internet  site, you have to say this is the way it was on December 19th 1998. Somehow part of this has to be the way we integrate the static with the dynamic in  our knowledge products. 

Engelbart: The NIC and MetaNIC level that is a very central concern at that level, how you do that. The hypothesis is that the CoDiak dynamic knowledge repository is very central in how you run a NIC effectively. Yet we really note that you have to transfer experience also. You have to have  people getting involved at the NIC level and moving back and forth from their members. That part I don't know if we make clear in the picture, but there  is no way it is going to happen electronically for sometime till we have virtual being together. 

Audience: I want to reply to that with a general outline, certainly not in specifics. When you talk about encyclopedia, you are talking about a codified knowledge base. Where there is a point in time of what we know. One of Marcelo's slides really caught my eye today...the one that said education on  demand. Just as a blanket concept. What knowledge repository has to be fundamentally is a system that educates you on demand, on a specific  subject. It gives you the information you need to compensate for whatever level of ignorance yours is outside of one's specialty area. We are all  ignorant of a vast variety of subjects. Plumbing, ditch diggers. There are an amazing number of things to know about the best way to dig a ditch. If you  look at doctors, there is this huge composititory of medical knowledge going every day. By the time that they graduate, they are already ten years out  of date. They need a system that will educate them on demand when they are facing something new. That in a general outline has to be the solution to  the problem. 
 

Engelbart: That has been a basic picture all along about how you integrate the teaching machine, or educational facility in the actual structuring of your knowledge products you have to provide for the books and guides so that you can have learning on demand. I have to close off the meeting. In this  large-scale problem situation that we have, it is large-scale in another sense. It goes from the big to the very small. Down in the details are some of the  important things we have to start getting going. One of those are the new things we have to get worked into the tool system that start helping do things  like flexibly portray, and really break away from the what you see is what you get version of a page. That opens up a lot of interesting potentials. You  can color code, you can have smart agents that can color code the parts of speech, how much training and skill will that take before it will help you go  through much faster. People can try it but they also need to put it to work and see what role it would play. 

We started painting a little design. In session four we started pointing out how with this web based intermediary that something that IBM puts on the market. I don't know if that is terribly unique, but it offers a lot of things that you could between your browser and products you have this thing that  would translate for you. What kind of translations. When we go get something, we tell this what we want to get. We also tell it that when we get it what  we also want to see is a particularly view. So it can transform that. You have to trust it still to not distort what is there but just give you the view that  you wanted. It needs to be something that is available as people start browsing around our world. Even from our world looking out to others. It would  be a marvelous experience. Another thing you could do is just name the kind of programming source code, C, C++, or Java, and you could make  transcoding so that it would be as you are addressing a point in there. It goes and gets it transforms it to what it takes to portray on your browser and  could install tags in there that would be target points for links. So every time you see it, it has those tags on it that you could use for spot linking. So  then you say that could make a lot of difference in the programming world. The specifications and everything else go together. We could also do it for  computer aided design systems. That sort of thing is something that doesn't wait for a big ponderous new application coming out. We could  experiment with things like that, that would reveal and show stuff a lot. We actually want to get something started like that. We have some volunteer  energy going and we hope we can push some doorbells for other places to do it. Something like that can come into other people's world and show them  that they can look at whatever they want. Hey, I can look at a word document now and see it in the different ways. Or Lotus notes, spreadsheets, or  whatever you have. So this transcoding intermediary opens up tremendous things to experiment with, and maybe actually produce it's a way to say maybe if we called this OHS1, and next month it is going to go up and change. We are going to get more and more ideas like the people out there that  have been experimenting with the ways in which you can depict knowledge, study it, take it apart, parse it, and sketch it. Things like that which are all  very good. Those have to have some place that in the evolutionary set up you have to come in and find out the ways in which you could integrate  those things. They will all get integrated in a way in which the new capabilities are there. They have to be lived. It doesn't work to have something  sitting off all by itself. You have to go and learn about that environment, work with in it, and then what do you do? 

Next week we will have and example of that. We have a young man, Ted Nelson that is coming. You have to have faith that somehow that stuff will get integrated into the rest of the world. It is very stimulating. There a quite a few others that pop up that would really like to get on a list about how do you  start integrating the proposed new ways of thinking and working that some of them offer. We just have to do something like that for evolution. The  kind of standards that Jon Bosak has fostered is very important to try to be consistent with that, so that what you do can be more generalized. I think  we are just about out of time. This is the second time I have brought slides along that I was going to show you the potential ways of working that there  isn't time. I really want to go through and get in the basic pictures and discuss them with you. I appreciated that a lot. I think we are going to have to  close now. Thank you gentlemen for giving your special talks. Maybe you'll come along with this for the part three of this. 

 ---