"As much as possible, to boost mankind's collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems."  0A

Contact:
Bootstrap Institute,
Bootstrap Institute,
6505 Kaiser Dr., 
Fremont, CA 94555 
Tel. (510) 713-3550 
Fax: (510) 792-3506 
Email: 
* Administration
* Webmaster
  0C

Valid XHTML 1.0!  This web site is maintained by Bootstrap volunteers  0D

On this page:
[>] Our niche
[>] Reasons for action
[>] Our mission
[>] Those funny purple numbers
  1

Bootstrap Institute logo 
. 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
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
--
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Above space serves to put hyperlinked targets at the top of the window
National Medal of Technology  11

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.  11A

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 chiseled 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.  11B

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.  11C

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. [vE].  11D