Douglas Engelbart

What they built

Engelbart led the Augmentation Research Center at SRI, where his team produced NLS (oN-Line System) — the first working demonstration of the mouse, hypertext, bitmapped screens, collaborative real-time editing, and video teleconferencing, shown in the 1968 "Mother of All Demos." He founded the Bootstrap Institute (later the Doug Engelbart Institute) in 1988 to pursue the rest of his framework: accelerating humanity's "Collective IQ."

In their own words

• "By 'augmenting human intellect' we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems… We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human 'feel for a situation' usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids." — Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, 1962.

• "The key is to accelerate the natural co-evolution of our Tool and Human Systems toward ever-more powerful Augmentation Systems, enabling increasingly effective Collective IQ. I call this strategic approach a Bootstrapping Strategy, an important aspect of which is that the teams that are accelerating the co-evolution use what they are developing in support of their own collective work." — quoted in Doug Engelbart Institute materials on bootstrapping.

• "The perception people have of the future, of what its potential is, of what there is to do about it etcetera, is the biggest single problem in mankind's ability in the future to harness technology and really take advantage of it." — 1994 Smithsonian interview (Elon University "Imagining the Internet").

Principles as they articulated them

• Co-evolution of Tool System and Human System. Neither hardware nor organizational practice can advance alone; the two must evolve together.
• ABC activities. A = primary work; B = improving how you do the work; C = improving how you improve. The leverage lives in C.
• Bootstrapping. The team building augmentation tools must use those tools on themselves first.
• Collective IQ. A measurable property of a group, not an individual: how well a collection of people can concurrently develop, integrate, and apply knowledge toward a mission.
• CODIAK. Concurrent Development, Integration, and Application of Knowledge — his term for the core collaborative activity that should be instrumented.

What surprised me in research

• He considered the mouse a trivial part of his work and was frustrated that it became his headline legacy. The framework — the social and organizational half — is what he wanted remembered, and it was largely ignored by industry.
• His "Collective IQ" is not a metaphor. He really wanted it measured, with improvement curves, and he built CODIAK to operationalize it.
• The Bootstrap Institute was self-funded and struggled for decades. He kept running seminars into his late 80s; the Doug Engelbart Institute is still operated by his daughter Christina.

Recent or later work

From 1989 until his death in 2013, Engelbart's focus was entirely on the "unfinished revolution": organizing Networked Improvement Communities (NICs), the 1995 "Boosting Our Collective IQ" seminar series, and lobbying institutions to take the B/C activity levels seriously. MIT Technology Review's 2013 piece was titled "Douglas Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution" precisely because industry adopted his artifacts and ignored his thesis. The Doug Engelbart Institute now maintains the archive and continues the Collective IQ research program.

Sources

• https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/174/ — "I. On Bootstrapping Our Collective IQ" — dougengelbart.org
• https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engelbart-AugmentingHumanIntellect.pdf — Augmenting Human Intellect (1962) — dougengelbart.org
• https://www.elon.edu/u/imagining/expert_predictions/interview-with-douglas-engelbart/ — 1994 Smithsonian interview — elon.edu
• https://www.technologyreview.com/2013/07/23/177246/douglas-engelbarts-unfinished-revolution/ — Douglas Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution — technologyreview.com
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart — Douglas Engelbart — wikipedia.org