Blogging the plaNetwork conference in San Francisco.

FYI, here is a link to more info on Hardin Tibbs.

Ken Jordan: Here to honor Doug Engelbart. ASN is a direct reference to Engelbart's 1962 paper on Augementing Human Intellect.

His work came at a time when very few people thought about the social aspects of technology. He saw that it wasn't going to be just about a big brain kind of computer, but as an extensions of each person's own personal creativity and as a platform of collaboration. He developed many of the specific tools that we all now take for granted.

Doug and Jim Fournier are up to talk. Doug sees potential and need to do things to address issues just brought up. Jim: we need to understand the motivation that moved to Doug to do what he did. Doug: thanks, but enough of that.

Doug has a slide presentation. His lifetime goal: as much as possible boost mankind's collective capability for addressing complex problems. This came to him one day, as a young man, thinking about his future.

World is getting more and more complex, and we need to work together to collaborate. Our ability to work together was not increasing as fast as the problems. He has a radar operator in the Navy, got exposed to computing. He decided to get into computers. He had all these dreams about how to use computers for people to work together.

Talking about how he learned that academia wasn't set up to support him to do what he wanted. So, he got into industry, which turned out to not be too into supporting him to do this either.

Summary of what he was / is up to: Diagram of "Collective IQ in Action, typical of every 'Social Organism'". Concurrently: integrating, collaborating, developing, learning, (re)using. His work now: what are ways to do this.

Slide: Large-Scale Facilitated Evolution. Common goal of community improvement. How to improve collective IQ of such improvements communities.

Slide: Infrastructure Capabilities. Higher levels depending on lower levels.

Slide: Tool Systems.

Slide: Human Systems. (He is going fast!) Needed, tools are not enough. Human systems capabilities have to be depended on, from before tools appear. Have to think of the co-evolution of these two.

Have to build on basic human capabilities: sensory, perceptual, motor and mental. Develop proficiency. Call all these things: that which augments the human. If we are going to improve humans, have to address all these things. Human, Augmentation-System Interface. This is what is really to be talked about in the human computer interface.

Comparing to the way people viewed cars in the early 1900s. If you talked to people back then about how they drive and all the rules and all the skills involved to drive well: we take it all for granted how well we have trained our sensory system now to do these things. Talking about trying to explain to someone in the 1900s how we merge on the freeway, how insane it would sound that we merge on freeways at 70 mph and all the things we judge to determine when to merge.

He is making points about how things have evolved in human skills as tools have come along. The augmentation model is valid over huge scale. Purposely accelerating evolution: requires very effective strategies in applying our resources.

So, what kind of improvement infrastructure could foster this evolution. This is what he has been talking about for a while.

Slide: Concurrency and interoperability. (He makes a joke: how do you work this? Mouse? [Doug invented the mouse, FYI])

Talking about process of translating from 200 1st tier suppliers to 2000 2nd tier suppliers to 4000 3rd tier suppliers. Ideas for open hyperdocument systems. How to scale up. Each one has to have its own dynamic knowledge repository, and they all have to stay concurrent. To scale up to global scope.

Slide: strategies. Divide activities. Those that serve customer. Those that improve product cycle time and quality. Those that improve improvement cycle time and quality. Pool those into an improvement community between multiple organizations. Creates / becomes a networked improvement community. Better collective IQ.

Going from better IC (improvement community) to better NIC (networked improvement community). Then, create NIC of NICs. This led to his bootstrap institute. The better we get at getting better, the better and faster we'll get better.

All this generating quantum leaps. Technology stuff getting way out there. But, it takes time to get organizations oriented to the new frontiers, and they need to ready for it. Society should work together to help everyone prepare for this evolution. Not getting trapped into little niches of evolution.

Talking about hi-resolution linking: many viewing options. Wanted links to be able to connect to any object, not just text. Alternate views, like first line of every paragraph. Created 36 different symbols for different views. (He is referring to a system he developed, HyperScope, that he uses but hasn't been commonly adopted.) Talking about his "I-Files" and transcoders into the format you see. Addressibility is there too.

We look at words on a page and don't read characters, we read words. So, different levels of human facility that can be built into new kinds of browsers.

Slide: link database. Keeping track of all the links going back and forth. How many links are pointing to this document. All kinds of interactions. Can backtrack too.

Talking about topic maps and argument structures as ways of looking at collections of documents, linked together. This is the kind of thing that we can use to learn more. Can really pull together the kind of knowledge that is hard to pin down. This is in the future for us, the way the alphabet was once in our future.

Need to develop role of workshop architect, The role that emphasizes turning their communities of practice into networked improvement communities. He started doing this with ARPANET.

Working on continuing evolution towards a full-scale Open Hyperdocument System. Add optional user interface systems, some for pedestrian users and some for power users. Increasing array of important knowledge domains represented. Create high performance teams. Initial role as support teams to push frontier of capability along.