Bootstrap Institute
.
June 24, 2003
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 individual and organizational ability to better address
problems that are complex and urgent.*
It is along this chosen career path that he became prominent as a
pioneer of the digital age. He garnered fame especially through his
invention of the computer mouse and was the first to use the
cathode-ray tube for the display of text, of graphics and of the
mouse pointer (the monitor as we know it today). He is credited with
pioneering online computing and email, and other inventions and
innovations. More on this will be found in the Chronicle, a part
of this website that conserves the past. 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. However, the overarching aim of these
web pages 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
Foundation for Engelbart's
experience-based and logically worked out strategy is an optimized
bootstrapping approach for drastically improving on any organization's
already existing 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, which is an improving of the
improvement process. His paper Toward High-Performance
Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware argues that highest
payoff comes from engaging in that C-activity. 2B
Engelbart's bootstrapping principle is
most generally applicable. Hence, it may not only profit private
corporations, but also serve public institutions and all levels of
government. On the high end of the scale, we find the United Nations; on
the other end, individuals. 2C
The Bootstrap Institute and associates
seek to promote an international Alliance of stakeholders, the Bootstrap
Alliance. The Alliance provides funding for critical elements of
Engelbart's strategy: an open hyperdocument system and a hyperscope. 2D
The open hyperdocument system
(OHS) is a standards-based, open source framework for developing
collaborative, knowledge management applications. Its primary objective
is to support the creation, organization, and maintenance of Dynamic
Knowledge Repositories (DKR). 2E
The OHS's initial design specifications
are a result of 50 years of innovation and experimentation by Doug
Engelbart and his team of researchers among a variety of user
communities, including aerospace and software development. These
requirements include fine-grained addressability of all types of
documents and support for multiple ways of viewing and manipulating
them. Some of these features have found their way into existing tools,
such as the World Wide Web, while others are currently being explored.
The purpose of the OHS is to serve as a standard framework for these
features, so that different applications may interoperate with the DKR
and with each other. 2F
As an intermediate step toward
building the OHS, Engelbart has proposed the design for a hyperscope, a
tool for browsing otherwise incompatible document types and facilitating
linkages between them. The hyperscope would be built on top of the OHS's
hyperdocument architecture. 2G
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. Named Unrev-II (the
unfinished revolution, part II), it 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. 2H
The Bootstrap Institute is a
California corporation under the law, but it functions more as a
non-profit organization. Any services provided by the Institute merely
serve to help fund the Institute's work. 2I
The site map 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 continually seeking to
correct. 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 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. 2J
The site's desired functioning and
consequential architecture are still severely handicapped by the
prevalence 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 are and remain: experiential and
evolutionary. [vE]. 2K
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. 3A8
December 31, 1999
Our mission 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. 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
toward what could become national improvement infrastructures, as well
as a global improvement infrastructure. [DCE, CE,
PR. MD, PY] 4B10
____
Footnotes: 9
Re Engelbart
and the Institute. Douglas Engelbart and his daughter,
Christina Engelbart, incorporated the Bootstrap Institute 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. 9A
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. 9B
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. 9B1
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. 9C
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. 9D
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. 9E
Imagine what we can
accomplish together
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