"As much as possible, to boost mankind's collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems." 6
Brief: 7
May 11, 2001
Honors.7A
Doug Engelbart will receive an honorary doctorate for "seminal contributions to the development of technology" from Santa Clara University at their Commencement  ceremonies on Sunday, June 17, 2001 at 9:45am. 7A1

And on October 25, he will receive The British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal after their Annual General Meeting. 7A2


8
The National Medal of Technology, the highest award in its class in the United States. On December 1, 2000. The White House bestowed the medal on Douglas Engelbart essentially for his technological achievements, including the invention of the computer mouse. Still to be recognized is that Engelbart's technological career is but part of a humanitarian career. His dream is to get society to buy into a means of boosting its ability to successfully cope with complex and urgent problems. 8A.

He first acted on this dream by entering a PhD program in 1951 to learn about computers. During two decades from 1957 on, he had an opportunity (mostly as Director of his Augmentation Research Center of Stanford Research International) to act on the technological and applied psychological underpinning of his dream. In 1977, commercial forces chiselled out the humanitarian part for seven years running. Then, from 1984 until 1989, while in the employ of McDonnell Douglas as senior scientist, he was able to continue from where he left off. 8B.

Seeing no commercial value in Engelbart's work, the company's executive fired him and his staff, and closed down his laboratory. It was his darkest hour, but bouncing back, Engelbart continued to propagate his ideas through his Bootstrap Institute.. 8C

From 1989, he has been increasingly recognized for his contributions mainly, but no longer exclusively, to technology. He has become the recipient of an extraordinarily long string of awards, including the Lemelson-MIT Prize of $500,000, and culminating in the National Medal of Technology. But the all-encompassing  part of his struggle continues. 
And as irony has it, on yet another technological foundation: the "open hyperdocument system" which is drawing most of the interest and support for his ongoing work.  [vE]. 8D


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Bootstrap Institute
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Institute. Chronicle. Colloquium. OHS. Context. Alliance. This website. Search.

B/I home. Bootstrapping. Collective IQ. Engelbart papers. B/I services.

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December 10, 2000
Who we are. How we think. What we do. 2

The Bootstrap Institute was conceived by Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart to further his lifelong career goal of boosting any organization's ability to successfully address problems that are complex and urgent.*  It is along this chosen career path that he became a prominent pioneer of the digital age early in life, garnering fame through his invention of the ubiquitous computer mouse and other inventions and innovations. More on this will be found in the Chronicle, a part of this website that conserves the past and looks toward the future of  improving society's collective IQ. We hope that the Chronicle will prove especially useful to those of a historical bent of mind as well as to members of the press. The overarching aim of these web pages, however, is to inform decision-makers and a wider public about a strategy and tools for achieving peak performance within public institutions and commercial enterprises in the interest of mankind as a whole. 2A

The foundation of Engelbart's experience-based and logically worked through strategy is an optimized bootstrapping approach for drastically improving on any organization's traditional improvement processes. Referring to an organization's principal work as an A-activity and to ordinary efforts at process improvement as a B-activity, he denotes bootstrapping as a C-activity. The lower menu bar mentions sections named Bootstrapping and Collective IQ. Currently "grayed out," we aim to provide terse treatments of these topics for people at the  management level and above to show how and why C works. These subjects are treated in detail in the Engelbart papers and throughout the Colloquium. 2B

Being a logical construct, the bootstrapping principle is most generally applicable. Hence, it may be utilized by private corporations, by public institutions, by all levels of government. On the large end of the scale, we find the United Nations. On the small end of the scale, bootstrapping may be utilized by individuals as well. The Bootstrap Institute and an international Alliance of stakeholders add punch to bootstrapping through development acitivities. These activities, now mostly engaged in by high-caliber volunteers, especially concern the development of an open hyperdocument system (OHS). Details are found under OHS. The Bootstrap Institute provides some services that are detailed in the section B/I services. Although the Institute is a California corporation under the law, it functions more as a non-profit organization. The services provided merely help fund the Institute's work. 2C

The open hyperdocument system (OHS), a critical element of a superior bootstrapping strategy, serves to enhance the collective intelligence of its users by creating and providing sought-after and up-to-date information more efficiently. A fully developed OHS would be a successor to Engelbart's Augment, an integrated system of tools for knowledge workers that permits efficient, collaborative authorship of documents used in planning, analyzing and designing. After a long period of development at Stanford Research International under the name oN-Line System, Augment was brought to market by Tymshare Inc. in 1978. It had been designed to take advantage of the unique capabilities of networked computing machinery. With roots into the best thinking of the mid-20th  century, it is a tool designed to induce its users to perform at a higher level of intellectual endeavor. In this, the driving force behind Augment distantiates itself from the market forces that have put in common use today's wordprocessing tools with their WYSIWYG paradigm in which the more immediate ease of use is purchased at the expense of potentially superior human performance. 2D

A ten-week colloquium held at, and webcast from Stanford University early in 2000 provided Doug Engelbart with an opportunity to present his motivation and thought in the context of the professional views of 30-plus guest speakers who are currently working the frontiers of society, technology, business, and urgent concerns of people around the world. This educational experience has culminated in a stepped-up effort to bring the open-hyperdocument system to fruition. The story, a rich educational experience, is told in the part of this site called Colloquium. 2E

This website reflects the dynamism of continual interaction among Engelbart and his collaborators who mostly serve as the Bootstrap Institute's local and telecommuting staff of volunteers.It might be said that over time and with so many participants having worked on this site, it has become a little disorganized in spots, a fact we are seeking to correct this so that henceforth any visitor should more easily find what he or she is looking for. We have introduced a system of double menu bars, with the upper bar listing the major parts of this site and the lower bar the sections of a selected part. The system serves to widen a visitor's purview and expedite his browsing. The site map found under Website ought make browsing through this site more efficient still. However, apart from these features, this site is fully intended to remain dynamic, hence ever-changing. 2F

The site's desired functioning and consequential architecture are still severely handicapped by the prevailence of a public networking methodology that does not yet permit the full implementation of Engelbart's individual and collaborative authoring of documents. The "funny purple numbers"*, quite aside from their immediate utility in identifying any document's elements, also serve notice that this format is but a step toward a progressive use of a superior mode of authoring and publishing. In the spirit of Engelbart's lifelong mode of working ever so fruitfully, keywords here remain experiential and evolutionary. [vE]. 2G

next. previous.
December 31, 1999
Reasons for action  3

The way Doug Engelbart perceives it: 3A

  • Our world is a complex place with urgent problems of a global scale. 3A1
  • The rate, scale, and complex nature of change is unprecedented and beyond the capability of any one person, organization, or even nation to comprehend and respond to. 3A2
  • Challenges of an exponential scale require an evolutionary coping strategy of a commensurate scale at a cooperative cross-disciplinary, international, cross-cultural level. 3A3
  • We need a new, co-evolutionary environment capable of handling simultaneous complex social, technical, and economic changes at an appropriate rate and scale. 3A4
  • The grand challenge is to boost the collective IQ* of organizations and of society. A successful effort brings about an improved capacity for addressing any other grand challenge. 3A5
  • The improvements gained and applied in their own pursuit will accelerate the improvement of collective IQ. This is a bootstrapping strategy. 3A6
  • Those organizations, communities, institutions, and nations that successfully bootstrap their collective IQ will achieve the highest levels of performance and success. 3A7
It is essentially these perceptions that have underlain the researches by Engelbart and his team,  work that laid to many innovations in computing and is now continuing in the development of an open hyperdocument system. Details. 3A8

next.previous.
December 31, 1999
Mission statement  4

In accord with the above reasons for action, Doug Engelbart developed throughout a lifetime a sense of mission, which the Bootstrap Institute seeks to implement. Some terms used in the following mission statement are briefly explained in footnotes appended to this page. They are put in their proper context in descriptions of bootstrapping and collective intelligence. 4A

The Institute's mission is to: 4B

  • Promote awareness of the scale, urgency, and complexity of the challenges we face. 4B1
  • Catalyze, launch, and shepherd an active, strategic pursuit of boosting the collective IQ on a scale commensurate with the rate, scale, and pervasiveness of change. 4B2
  • Create an exploratory environment where participants can collaborate, experiment, and set in motion advanced pilot outposts* in diverse application areas. 4B3
  • Enable a whole new way of thinking about the way we work, learn, and live together. 4B4
  • Promote development of a collective IQ among, within, and by networked improvement communities. 4B5
  • Cultivate a knowledge environment that includes a shared dynamic knowledge repository (DKR). 4B6
  • Foster development of an open-platform information system infrastructure based on an open hyperdocument systems (OHS) framework. 4B7
  • Share the A-B-C's of bootstrapping* and support co-evolution of human organizations and their tools. 4B8
  • Enable sharing of effort, cost and risks of advanced exploration among a diverse set of organizations and improvement communities. 4B9
  • Push the scaling of bootstrapping towards what could become national improvement infrastructures, as well as a global improvement infrastructure. [DCE, CE, PR. MD, PY]. 4B10
Imagine what we can accomplish together. 5
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Footnotes: 9

Re margins. These web-pages are available with or without margins. Pages with margins are easier to read when the browser window takes up the monitor's entire display area. Pages without margins will be preferred by users who resize their windows for viewing more than one window at a time. 9A[<]

Re next, previous ("quick-step"). These links permit stepping through a page rapidly, in this case by jumping from headline to headline. An expanded application of this feature helps a user to quickly browse through a document's headings, or through its paragraphs, or graphics, or tables, etc. Instead of the words next and previous, the only visible aspect of quick-step on this site normally is two underscores separated by a space, _ _. Mouse clicks on the first underscore brings up the next similar item of a document, e.g. a next heading or a next graphic. Mouse clicks on the second underscore calls up the previous similar item. Students of  large documents may may find it useful to have two copies of the same document in view, side-by-side. This, for example, is facilitated by using the tiling feature in the taskbar of Windows (TM). The second document may  be used for rapidly locating some text, table or graphic without a person losing his or her place in the first document. An example of the full deployment of this quick-step feature is found here, but be aware that, because of its many graphics, this is a long download with slow connections. 9B[<]

Re Engelbart and the Institute.  Douglas Engelbart incorporated the Bootstrap Institute with his daughter, Christina Engelbart, in 1988 as a California corporation. However, it actually functions more like a non-profit organization in their quest to form strategic alliances aimed at dramatically improving the performance of organizations and, thereby, society at large. This is accomplished through a collaborative Alliance Program, as well as through development projects, management seminars and expeditions, consulting, speaking, and publishing. The work is funded primarily through government R&D contracts and Alliance sponsors. For details, see the sections named Service and Alliance. 9C[<]

Re purple numbers.  Formally named location numbers (also statement numbers, structural statement numbers), these identify in a document such structural elements as titles, paragraphs, graphics, etc. Accordingly, the primary purpose of a location number is to specifically target a component of a document by hyperlinking from a source document currently in use. Conversely, right-clicking on a live location number permits putting the referenced address (URL) into a buffer whence it may be copied into other documents - even, with appropriately  receptive documents, as another live link to the original target. For example, right-clicking on a live, i.e. hyperlinked, location number in a Netscape web page brings up a small window that offers the option to Copy Link Location. This option retains the live characteristic of the link when the copying is done into the browser's Composer. 9D

Many older documents found on this website contain location numbers that are not live. The beneficial use of location numbers was originally designed as part of Augment, a text processing system for co-operating, networked professionals engaged in such knowledge work as planning, analyzing and the designing of highly complex systems. More detail. 9D1[<]

Re collective IQ.  The abbreviation IQ in the term collective IQ should be interpreted as a generic synonym for intelligence, not as in its original meaning as a measure of an individual's intelligence. 9E[<]

Re advanced pilot outposts. Strategically placed outposts in time. These outposts are staffed by people well qualified to get a best possible fix on the futuristic outlook of especial concern to a particular organization and thereby ought to provide a superior insight in how an organization may move ahead. Advanced pilot outposts may be financed by a number of commercial organizations or public bodies with common interests. Universities are seen as suitable locales for such outposts. 9F[<]

Re A-B-C's of bootstrapping.  Any organization's stock in trade is called here.an A-activity; its ordinary R&D work to improve on A is called a B-activity. The bootstrapping strategy serves to improve on B and is called a C-activity. The value of C may be perceived as garnering compound interest on an organization's intellectual capital. One advocate of that perception is Dr. Curtis Carlson, President and CEO of SRI International, see What is the value proposition? in the Colloquium section. 9G[<]
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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