Projects and Initiatives 0

About Our Projects 1

Flagship projects of the Doug Engelbart Institute are aimed at dramatically improving Collective IQ the collective ability of organizations and societies to effectively address complex, urgent challenges. Whether pursuing opportunities or solving important problems, their innovation capacity depends entirely on their Collective IQ. One measure of a group's Collective IQ is how effectively it can develop, integrate, and apply its knowledge. We envision a specially endowed knowledge work environment of enabling collaborative practices and tools, including the explicit cultivation of dynamic knowledge repositories (DKRs), and the tools needed to facilitate it all (Open Hyper Tools) – a culmination of decades of pioneering work. 1a

Strategic Approach. For those interested in optimizing innovation capacity, we advocate a special approach for collectively exploring and deploying these new capabilities within strategically targeted pursuits, whereby the individuals, communities and teams aimed at advancing these capabilities would experiment with and use emerging best practices themselves ("bootstrapping"), forming networked improvement communities (NICs) to collaboratively evolve and rigorously apply their own Collective IQ to the advancement of Collective IQ within their networks, organizations, and customers/constituencies, as well as within communities, societies, and whole nations.1b

It is our greatest hope that, as the problems in our world grow exponentially more complex and urgent, our Collective IQ capability can be advanced at a surpassing rate, and be applied to meet the ever pressing challenges in our communities, organizations, nations, and planet.1c

As a parallel effort, we sponsor ongoing collaborative efforts to restore and make widely available the historic archives from Doug Engelbart's work.

Framing the Question 2

It bears special note that the strategic approach we advocate originally served as the catalyst for the prolifery of breakthrough innovations that came pouring out of Doug's lab in the 1960s and '70s, probably more breakthroughs than any other lab in the history of computing before or since. He designed it into his lab. He began with the question (paraphrased) "How can we dramatically improve how we work together to solve important problems?" which led directly to the more challenging question "How can we accelerate this innovation so we can solve more problems sooner and more effectively?". We invite you to approach our projects (and yours) along the same lines:

How do you foster and accelerate innovation within and across organizations?
How do you network the stakeholders?
How do you capture, catalyze and organize the collective brainpower to optimize innovation?
What kinds of tools and practices would help raise your collective effectiveness?
How do you keep innovating the above, actively increasing your networks effectiveness, leveraging the collective IQ?
What if you could tap in to an innovation network that was focused on innovating innovation networks?

Current Projects 3

The Engelbart Archives Initiative
Preservation for historic interest, and to inform a next generation pursuit of the compelling strategic vision and significant prior work. An ongoing collaboration with SRI International, Sun Labs, New Media Consortium, the Internet Archive, and distinguished volunteers from Doug's alumni group to gather, sift through, catalog, digitize, and upload archival documents, video footage, photos, and digital files for preservation and broad-based accessibility. Currently working with 2,000+ digitized photos, 150+ digitized video tapes, including the raw footage from the Bootstrap Dialogs Project, plus dozens of digitized papers. This work complements the existing collections at Computer History Museum and Stanford University Libraries Special Collections. See our Engelbart Archives Special Collections page for more, including links into the extensive online resources already available.

The Bootstrap Paradigm Map Project
How do we get our hands around the vision and promising implementation strategies? This initiative makes more accessible the Bootstrap Paradigm Map for study, extension, and implementation of Doug's seminal vision. Adding to previous video seminars, we filmed high quality video capture of Doug Engelbart, Jeff Rulifson and Christina Engelbart in discussion during August 2008; this has been filmed at the Stanford Video studio, editing is next – see the Bootstrap Dialogs Projects page for more detail. To view the presentation slides and video footage, visit our Bootstrap Paradigm Map project page.

Bootstrapping Innovation and Collective IQ
How do we implement these strategies in our own organizations and networks? This initiative distills Doug's Bootstrap "Paradigm Map" into five implementable organizing principles you can embed in your organization or network. See our Bootstrapping Innovation Resources page for highlights, guidelines, case example, press, and more.

The NIC Initiative
How do we organize with others to seriously pursue this vision? This initiative fosters and facilitates the emergence of, and collaboration among, networked improvement communities (NICs) internationally.

The Dynamic Knowledge Initiative
How do we more effectively tap the human potential for working smarter and faster on important problems collectively? This initiative explores more effective technologies and practices for networking teams and communities, with special attention given to the capture and utility of the group's emerging dynamic knowledge repository (DKR), all of which make up a dynamic knowledge environment. Which emerging technologies can be cobbled together to enable more substantive engagement, and faster/smarter advancement of shared objectives? Sample Dynamic Knowledge Repository -->

The Augment Demo Project
Bringing forward the underlying framework for technology to facilitate dramatically increasing collective IQ, innovation, and collaboration among NICs working on different pieces of the puzzle. As part of the Archives Initiative, and to inform the Dynamic Knowledge Initiative, this project captures the intent, functionality, and unique capabilities of the as yet only working prototype Augment in screencast demo format. See our Demos page for existing NLS and Augment demos.

Student Showcase
How do we support next-generation scholars and practitioners? For professors, students, and learning institutions and networks, see our Student Showcase for featured student projects, and links to college course(s) that study Doug Engelbart's work, as well as our Just for Kids page.

Related Initiatives 4

C Community and Swimy NIC - joint activities spearheaded by Hirohide Yamada in Japan. "Swimy is a Networked Improvement Community to augment our thought behind our work by exchanging ideas in the spirit of making the world a better place to live." (see our About NICs page) Swimy NIC has been active for about 10 years with about 200 individual members, and derives its name from the fairy tale Swimmy, by Leo Lionni, which describes a collective, cooperative approach to solving large, complex problems.

Extension: Purple MediaWiki - an exciting extension to MediaWiki that allows fine-grained addressability to the contents of wiki pages. See also Purple MediaWiki Project Page, and Purple MediaWiki: Fine-Grained Addressability of Wiki Content. (Editor's Note: This is a great example of an Open Hyper Tool based on our OHS framework.)

NMC Initiatives - the NMC is an international not-for-profit pioneering consortium of learning-focused member organizations dedicated to the exploration and creative application of leading edge technologies and practices. [Editor's Note: This organization provides an excellent case example of a bootstrapping networked improvement community (NIC)].

Outside Innovation - and the Patricia Seybold Group. This is Patty's blog on customer-centric innovation. For brief backgrounder see Principles of Outside Innovation, and read the full treatment in Patty's excellent book Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-design Your Company's Future. [Editor's Note: This practice provides a great example of cultivating stakeholder participation, one of the innovation accelerators built in to the bootstrapping strategy.]

At MIT:
Center for Collective Intelligence, Tom Malone, Director – see especially Measuring Collective Intelligence.
MIT Media Lab, Hiroshi Ishii, Associate Director – see especially his Tangible Media Lab.

Debate/Discussion Tools:
DebateGraph - David Price's global debate map (see the Doug Engelbart Institute on DebateGraph); and Jeff Conklin's Dialogue Mapping there.

yourolivebranch.org - your global social networking site to connect with people and organizations who share the common goal of helping us all become more peaceful and sustainable – visit the Doug Engelbart Institute page there.

Past Projects5

HyperScope release party 2006
[Photo courtesy Peter Kaminski]

Events 5a

Historic Events - key events featuring Doug Engelbart and/or his seminal work, from his 1968 "Mother of All Demos", to the 2008 40th anniversary celebration "Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing".

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R&D5b

HyperScope - developed the initial HyperScope prototype through a modest grant from NSF in 2006. Our core team included Eugene Kim, Brad Neuberg, and Jonathan Cheyer, Doug Engelbart, and Christina Engelbart. See about the HyperScope Release Party on our Historic Events page, as well as the HyperScope2006 wiki for project archives.

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Visual AugTerm (VAT) - developed a modern windows interface to Augment in VisualWorks with funding from ARPA in the mid-1990s, with Bob Czech as the lead software developer. See the VAT pages of the HyperScope wiki for details.

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Archival5c

We have worked closely with the good folks at Internet Archives, Stanford University Libraries, the Computer History Museum, and the Smithsonian Institute to capture and preserve Doug's work. See More Archives at our online Library for details.

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The Engelbart Mural Project - collaborated on the Engelbart Mural project led by Eileen Clegg of Visual Insight to visually depict a timeline of Doug's visionary work in the context of what was happening in society, in business mangement trends, and in the personal and interactive computing revolution.

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