Doug Engelbart
Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart was born in Oregon, USA, in 1925. After becoming an electrical engineer he decided to commit himself to the cause of enhancing the intellectual and collaborative capabilities of the mankind, in order for us to be able to cope with the huge, urgent challenges that arise. He has acomplished many hardware and software inventions, in the user interface and in hypertext. His approach is now being pursued by the "Doug Engelbart Institute".
Goal
Engelbart's goal is to improve the means the mankind has to face the complex, urgent problems at global scale. Computers can assist us to improve how we operate with knowledge, how we collect, manipulate and share it, and how we communicate with each other to build teams. He calls it augmenting intellect. It does not consist in a particular, already designed, closed method, but in a methodology of progressive improvement. Appart from doing particular activities (level A), organisations must work to improve them (level B), and other organisations must work towards improving the improvement process (level C).
Quoted from the book The Engelbart Hypothesis. Dialogs with Doug Engelbart (page 138):
Engelbart's Reasons for Action
Our world is a complex place with urgent problems of a global scale. 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.
Challenges of an exponential scale require an evolutionary coping strategy on a commensurate scale at a cooperative, cross-disciplinary, international, cross-cultural level.
We need a new, co-evolutionary environment capable of handling simultaneous complex social, technical, and economic changes at an appropriate rate and scale.
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. The improvements gained and applied in their own pursuit will accelerate the improvement of collective IQ. This is a bootstrapping strategy.
Those organizations, communities, institutions, and nations that successfully bootstrap their collective IQ will achieve the highest levels of performance and success.
Some references
The Mother Of All Demos
In this historical demo from 1968 Doug Engelbart presented the NLS "Online System", a computing system with lots of inventions: the mouse, a special hand-keyboard, visual word processing, smooth hierarchy viewing and editing, editable navigation links, teleconference and many more. A tape is fortunately available:
See also the page at SRI International about the 40th anniversary celebration of the Demo with speeches by Christina Engelbart and Alan Kay among others.
Doug Engelbart Institute
The Doug Engelbart Institute based in California is an applied initiative to scale up the "collective intelligence".
More References
The Library page from the Doug Engelbart Institute offers an overwiew and a detailed list of papers and videos.
At www.invisiblerevolution.net there is an interesting and rich web documentary presenting Engelbart's work and vision.
The book The Engelbart Hypothesis. Dialogs with Doug Engelbart presents his ideas.
Programm For The Future: A conference inspired by him.
