Doug Engelbart's Keynote Address at the Conference on Accelerating Change 2004 at Stanford University, Nov 2004 https://web.archive.org/web/20051231102759id_/http://accelerating.org/ac2004/ WATCH VIDEO: https://youtu.be/BRDC0HEbbDw HEAR AUDIO: https://archive.org/details/ITC.AC2004DougEngelbart2004.11.07AcceleratingChange2004 ABSTRACT: In 1962, Dr. Engelbart began focusing his efforts on constructing a conceptual framework that would become his seminal work, originally written in a research report prepared for the Director of Information Sciences of the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. In this work, Dr. Engelbart describes the groundwork for such concepts as augmenting human intellect, improvement infrastructure, co-evolution of artifacts with social-cultural language-practices, and bootstrapping. The motivations for this framework were (and continue to be) the idea that both complexity and urgency are increasing exponentially and that the combination of both complexity and urgency will soon challenge our public and private organizations. Thus, organizations must actively work against the pressures of complexity and urgency to become increasingly faster and smarter at their core missions, and as such, organizations will need to become faster and smarter at how organizations continue to improve.

1. Facilitating the Evolution of
our Collective IQ
Strategically improving our capability for
coping with complex, urgent, large-scale
problems.
Douglas C. Engelbart
Accelerating-Change Conference
Stanford University, 7-Nov-04

2. Life-Changing Epiphany
Let me design a professional
goal which will maximize the
contribution my career can
make to mankind!
Just-engaged, 25-yr-old Country Kid,
full of excited thoughts about building a family:
“Hey, but there’s also that professional career.
Some big plans there, too?” (Over-does it!)

3. Weeks Later: Naïve Country Kid’s
Lifetime Goal Emerged, and Stuck!
“As much as possible, to boost
mankind’s collective capability
for coping with complex, urgent
problems”
Continuous, dedicated pursuit
now for over 50 years.

4. Consider a community’s Collective IQ
as its relative capability for dealing with
complex, urgent problems
• To understand them as thoroughly as
possible
• To unearth the best candidate solutions
• To assess resources and operational
capabilities and select appropriate solution
commitments
• To understand how best to organize and
execute selected approaches
• To monitor progress and adapt effectively to
unforeseen complications. Etc. …

5. Collective IQ:
Emerged As Primary Strategic Focus
Dynamic
Knowledge
Repository
COncurrently
Developing,
Integrating, &
Applying
Knowledge
CODIAK Capability

6. “Capabilities” become a key,
central consideration
… and we find very important things to
observe about our capabilities:
Consider how they are derived;
And how they form an “infrastructure” that
opens an important perspective to our
quest for
significantly boosting
our “Collective IQ”!

7. Capability
Infrastructure
Humans’ Capabilities Depend Upon
Skills
Knowledge
Training
Basic Human Capabilities
Sensory Perceptual
Motor Mental
(This interface is much more significant than “HCI”)
Tool System
Media
Portrayal
Views
Study
Manipulations
Retrieve
Compute
Communicate
Human System
Paradigms
Organization
Procedures
Customs
Methods
Language
Attitudes
their Augmentation System

8. Purposefully pursuing accelerated evolution of mankind’s
knowledge development and application capabilities is
a HUGE CHALLENGE, and
requires very effective strategies in applying our resources.
This Augmentation Model
is valid over huge scale!
Individual
Human
Community
Of Practice
A Complete
Country
The World
Operative IQ
Collective IQ
Collective IQ
Collective IQ

9. Concurrency:Concurrency:
Scaling Up --Scaling Up --
actually, to, to
global scopeglobal scope..
AggregateAggregate
DKRDKR
IntelligenceIntelligence
CollectionCollection
RecordedRecorded
DialogDialog
DKRDKRIntell.Intell.DialogDialog
Critical Factor:
“Concurrent” Evolution of
Society’s DKRs

10. Large-Scale Facilitated
Evolution
• No one can specify the design for our future
capability infrastructure
– Far too many of the possible “improvement steps”
will change the design environment for other
improvement candidates.
• Have to depend upon an Evolutionary
Process!
• BUT, we CAN learn to FACILITATE this
evolutionary process!

11. Anticipate-able
Today
The World’s Organizations
in Human-Tool Space
Representative distribution of world’s societies
Tool System Utilization
HumanSystemDevelopment

12. “Co-Evolution Frontier”
Human-Systems and Tool Systems
Interactively Co-Evolving
• Technology's quantum leaps generate
accelerating rate of opportunities.
• But, human paradigms already lag behind
opportunities.
• The scale of technology change = >
• Paradigm changes have to be accelerated
– Human skills, culture, governance already severely
stressed
Critically needed:
Effective Facilitation of our Co-Evolution.

13. Emergent Co-Evolution Frontier
On a scale we can barely anticipate
Outposts?
Best Routes?
Where best should your organization head?
….By what route? Who else is out there?
 We need a DKR
that provides the best
possible
understanding of the
current and projected
states of this frontier.
 Every member
organization can then
make its own choices
about its movements
into this frontier.
Uncharted, and Changing
Tool System Utilization
HumanSystemDevelopment

14. Networked Improvement Community (NIC)
Dynamic Knowledge Repository
Recorded
Dialog
Networked Improvement Community (NIC)
An Augmented Improvement Community,
Using best-practice Collective-IQ Capability
To improve its common-choice group capability.
Org 2
Org N
Org 1
• Investigate & collect intelligence
• Share experience of using leading-edge,
collective-IQ practices.
• Objective: provide best understanding of
the “Co-Evolution Frontier” for augmenting
this capability.
Knowledge
Products
Intelligence
Collections

15. Large-Scale Facilitated Evolution
Common Goal: Continuous Improvement of Large-Scale
Collective Capabilities.
• Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) defined
around specific areas of interest
• Prime Goal: Improve Collective IQ of NICs!
• Organize NICs into a large-scale Improvement
Infrastructure
– for facilitating the Concurrent Evolution
– of the associated Augmentation Systems.

16. Central Strategy: Bootstrapping
The better we get at getting better, the
better and faster we’ll get better.
1. Currently available information about Collective IQ
2. Best DKR/knowledge about improving Collective IQ
The Bootstrap Feedback Loop
3
3. NIC immediately utilizing the best Collective IQ
improvement knowledge
NIC for Improving
Collective IQ
1 2

17. Bootstrapping: Extension to Many NICs
The Bootstrap
Feedback Loop
NIC for
Improving
Collective IQ
NIC for
Improving
Capability Z.
NIC for
Improving
Capability X

18. Towards Effective Facilitation
Where/How to Start our First NICs?
NIC
Candidates?
Special
Improvement
Infrastructures?
Government
Agencies?
Businesses?
Professional
Societies?
Universities?
Philanthropic
Organizations?

19. OHS - the critical missing piece
The Need For An
Open Hyperdocument System (OHS)
To support the implementation and use of DKRs
• “Open” - Scaleable, evolvable, interoperable
across domains
• “Hyper” - To enhance access, maneuverability,
verification, study and integration.
• “Document” – The Knowledge Container into
which the emerging heterogeneous knowledge
is captured, integrated, and managed.
• “System” - Provides a complete “Community
Knowledge Workshop”

20. Generalize and Extend the
“Hyper” term
Let “Hyper” mean this:
“anything that new technology can bring to
the generation, storage, processing, and
portrayal of symbolized knowledge.”
– This definition provides much more than is
included in current “Hypertext”.
– E.g.: High-Resolution Addressing;
Optional Viewing; Heightened Mobility;
Powerful Manipulation Capabilities; etc…

21. Other Framework Items:
• Early Kickoff: a DKR about example DKRs
• Open Hyperdocument System (OHS)
• Launching OHS evolution: The HyperScope
• Knowledge-Workshop Architects
• Pedestrian Users … High-Performance Users
• Multiple UIS Options
• High-Performance Support Teams
• Inevitable: Hardcopy documents become
obsolete.

22. Challenges for DKR Development & Use:
Rationale for Building a DKR of DKR’s
• Special sets of skills required for increasing
capabilities
– Who will provide the integration & linking of
disparate information into the solid, verifiable
DKR structures
• Properties & structural principles for DKR
knowledge containers will be critical part of DKR
evolution
• Dynamic, seamless integration of new data while
preserving the DKR’s evolutionary history
• Assessment and rating of the organization’s
capabilities to develop and use its DKRs
• Capability Infrastructure – support a wide range of
usage capabilities, e.g. multiple user interfaces
that reflect increasing levels of user expertise.

23. Selected Reference Links
• Subset of pubs that are on the Web:
http://www.bootstrap.org/institute/bibliography.html
With Special interest in Items below:
• #3: Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual
Framework. Douglas C. Engelbart. 1962.
• #29: Toward High-Performance Organizations: A
Strategic Role for Groupware. Douglas C.
Engelbart. 1992.
• #32: A Draft OHS-Project Plan (The HyperScope)
Douglas C. Engelbart. 2000.

24. Argument visualization
resources
• Scholarly Ontologies Project
www.kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/scholonto
Visualizing Argumentation
(2003)
www.VisualizingArgumentation.info
Argument mapping for scholarly
publishing, scientific and public
policy debates, education,
teamwork, and organisational
memory.

25. More Reference Links
• Extensive general listing:
– http://www.usabilityvews.com/eng_by_backlinks.html .

26. THE END!!
AC Conference Presentation
Created and Presented by:
Doug Engelbart