 Hello, I'm Gardner Campbell, Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. I'm also a consultant for Education, Research and Outreach at the Doug Engelbart Institute. I'm grateful to the Coalition for Networked Information for this opportunity to share with you one of the projects we're currently working on at the Doug Engelbart Institute, a project I hope you'll want to be part of. To let you know what this project is and why it matters, I'm going to need to tell you a story. It's actually an epic story. And to honor Aristotle's advice, I'll have to begin in the middle of things. On December 9, 1968, a senior research engineer from what was then known as the Stanford Research Institute, SRI, sat on a stage in San Francisco and asked a question that would begin a revolution. If in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsible, responsive, instantly responsive to every action you had, how much value could you derive from that? That research engineer was Doug Engelbart. There on that stage, with a special live video feed brilliantly displayed on a giant screen behind him, Engelbart demonstrated the interactive computing environment he and his team had developed at SRI, and it all ran on a software system of astonishing power and flexibility called NLS, which stood for Online System. That demonstration is often called the mother of all demos, in recognition of its influence and importance. The film of that demo still inspires awe and wonder today, as images from 50 years ago move across our contemporary computer screens through a global light speed telecommunications network we call the Internet, an innovation that Engelbart's lab also helped to bring into being. Yet for many years, the apparently simple question with which Engelbart began the demo has been overlooked, and as a result, the revolution Engelbart began remains unfinished. If you watch that demo carefully and look beyond the dazzling technological innovations, you'll see and hear Engelbart exploring specific examples of the strategic value he had in mind. The HIRC is pursuing these goals, basic goal, improve the effectiveness with which individuals and organizations work at intellectual tasks. What does their effectiveness involve then? Better solutions, faster solutions, solutions to more complex problems, better use of human capabilities, really thinking about that. But a corollary goal is, besides improving effectiveness, to develop a system-oriented discipline for designing the means by which greater effectiveness is achieved. That's very important to us. The approach for this shouldn't result in a system-oriented discipline. NLS was always designed primarily as a collaborative, dynamic, networked information system. Engelbart knew that networks could yield not linear, but exponential benefits. His lead NLS programmer, Jeff Rulofsen, understood this very well. Here's how Rulofsen put it in a 1998 panel discussion on Engelbart's unfinished revolution. But there's a much more fundamental thing that Doug was actually onto at that time, which we got, which was, somehow, if we integrated all of this together the right way, we could get some sort of scaling effect, Moore's law kind of thing, in our capacity to solve problems, not just in the technology that we make. So a Moore's law effect on society as opposed to a Moore's law effect on our machines. And so if we had a group of 10 people, they have a certain capability, Doug's terms, to do something, then when we got 20 people together in this new kind of environment, rather than having one and a half times the capability, we'd have three times the capability. So there was some super scaling effect in the vision. And I think that's the part that we haven't really, we're still not onto in the revolution. Networked super scaling in a dynamic knowledge ecosystem. That's a goal that aligns well with the mission of the coalition for networked information, supporting the transformative promise of digital information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. Six years before that famous demo, Engelbart formulated and sought to answer that question of value he would ask on that stage. He did it in a 144 page research report that he called augmenting human intellect a conceptual framework. This year is the 60th anniversary of Engelbart's research report. A manifesto and a call to action. The subject of this project briefing is the Engelbart Institute's efforts to celebrate this anniversary by bringing people and organizations from all walks of life into a conversation and into collaborative action around the ideas Engelbart expressed in that 1962 report. We hope you will be part of that conversation and that together we can respond to Doug's call to action. If you look the whole map I drew there and said all this human system side, all the opportunities to change there and how the technology side has just grown way out of proportion in my view, just stupendos-y so. And fifth generation and all the hoopla about that is just all the more push in there. So it's got to be balanced. Well, there's a reason that in our culture we grew up and absorbed all of the human system side that we use without even questioning or thinking of it. They didn't come to us as inventions. Our culture yet hasn't gotten the perception that that part of it is open for progress and change. And the biggest challenge that's ahead for us if we want to make progress in this is to start affecting the perceptions that people have about what the potential is there and looking for change and finding out a rational way to do the evolution so it doesn't let break us apart. And I just love to get in the dialogue with people in about the strategies for that evolution. Which brings me to the project I'd like to share with you. The Engelbart Framework Annotation Project. Using an online annotation affordance called Hypothesis, readers from all over the world are entering into a conversation around Engelbart's ideas. With the kind of conversation Engelbart sought throughout his career but rarely found. To join this conversation head to framework.thoughtvectors.net. Look over the about page and other project information and begin reading and responding to augmenting human intellect, a conceptual framework. A lively and thoughtful conversation is already there waiting for your voice and your thoughts. You will discover many featured annotators, some who worked with Engelbart and some who encountered him for the very first time in these documents. These featured annotators offer important perspectives on Engelbart's framework. Perspectives that can help illuminate the ongoing conversation. Here are just a few examples. Jeff Rulofsen was lead programmer for the software system that powered the famous demo, the NLS you heard Engelbart talking about earlier in this briefing. But Rulofsen was far more important to the project than that title would indicate. Rulofsen understood at a very deep level the ideas Engelbart was exploring in NLS and Rulofsen's leadership in creating that online environment reflected not only his technical ingenuity but also his powerful philosophical insight into Engelbart's value question. Here's how Rulofsen described that value when I spoke with him recently. Doug's mind, the core difficult problem that we have is our ability to solve difficult problems. That Doug had thought his way through all of this so much that that he was really focused on this central idea of the capabilities, meaning our language, our thought processes, inference, implication, how we manipulate our documents and texts and ideas to solve a difficult problem. And he had even taken it to, not in the 62 paper, but much later he took it to this idea that it needed to have this collaborative component, that it was important that people work together in this augmented space with their augmented capabilities solving problems. You'll find more of Rulofsen's thoughts in his annotations on Engelbart's conceptual framework where you too can be part of the dialogue. Likewise, those who met Engelbart many years after the demo also came to realize just how central the 1962 document was to everything Engelbart imagined and helped to invent. Howard Reingold, an educator, artist, and journalist whose seminal work Tools for Thought analyzes the origins and development of interactive computing, titled his chapter on Engelbart, The Loneliness of a Long Distance Thinker. In our conversation, Reingold shared with me the experience of reading Engelbart's work for the first time. And I'll have to say that the discovery of Doug's paper was one of the, I think, two intellectual turning points in my life. And talking to Engelbart and reading his paper, I quickly understood that the scope of this was very large. It was about doing what language had done, what tools had done. It was about upgrading our ability to think and communicate. Doug's kind of quiet charisma and vision was also an extraordinary turning point for me. It was an example of what a thinker could do. Doug Engelbart's conceptual framework continues to inspire subsequent generations of educators, artists, and thinkers. Take, for example, a young German woman named Selene Keller, an artist and climate change activist whose current work includes a vigorous defense of the utopian imagination as a necessary element of substantial change. In our interview, Keller describes in poignant fashion her experience of reading Engelbart's work. So many things in there that just imagining that somebody could imagine that before it was there and writing it down. And then it kind of happens but completely wrong. But it was still fun to read it because there's so many things in there that are exciting and still, of course, would be exciting if it would be happening. Those complex thoughts and emotions awakened in Keller by Engelbart's writing are matched by a devoted teacher and blogger on the other side of the planet, Claudia Sarasso, who spoke with me from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Sometimes you think you're looking at something outside of yourself, but the text comes to you. You are part of the story. The text does not seem old. The first time I started reading, that was before I said yes to this invitation, I was struck by the word typewriter all of a sudden because I was lost in the text and I had forgotten it was 1962. So that mention of typewriter was like, hey, where are we? When are we? But when you publish those thoughts, you break a loneliness of the thinker or traveler in your own mind. The Engelbart framework project seeks to foster just this kind of careful, sensitive, thoughtful engagement, as you can see and hear in these interviews and in the many voices speaking with each other in our shared experience of annotating Engelbart's research report. When Engelbart lost the funding for his lab at SRI in the mid-1970s, he turned his view toward alliances of like-minded thinkers and organizations who would become what he called networked improvement communities, NICs or NICs. For the rest of his life, he spoke to people and organizations all over the world, continuing to stress the primacy of the ideas in the 1962 conceptual framework. This was often a lonely task. Dr. Christina Woolsey worked closely with Engelbart, both in the 1980s when she was at Apple Computers and for many years afterward. In her frameworks interview, Woolsey reflected on Doug's frustration, one that, as she points out, many of us share. I get frustrated and you get frustrated, but the depth for him, because it was so clear to him. It was so clear. And, you know, I mean, I wish he'd had a lab for another 20 years. I mean, in terms of people getting the chance to understand what he already knew and also for him to not have to keep going back, that he could have gone forward even more because he would have had a community that many of these things were embedded in it. You know, that would have been great. With our annotation project, the Engelbart Institute hopes to energize that lab once again, not in a particular place or organization, but in what Doug himself called an alliance in an effort to understand and act on the ideas and implications in that monumental 1962 publication. To that end, we at the Doug Engelbart Institute look forward to opportunities to be in conversation with CNI and its many esteemed members. We look at this initiative, these asynchronous project briefings, as an opportunity for just those kinds of connections, and we are honored to be in the first cohort. We hope that a renewed dialogue around Engelbart's 1962 magnum opus can inspire us all to renew our efforts to support human flourishing in a digital age. And we hope that you'll visit our website at DougEngelbart.org and contact me, or our Executive Director, Christina Engelbart, for more information about this project and about the work of the Institute in general. And finally, speaking as an English professor who's devoted his life and somewhat checkered career to verbal art and the curiosities that sometimes come with it, I can't help noticing that CNI and NIC are anagrams. Coincidence? Let's find out. Let's walk through that doorway together. Thank you. You might think it's fun to be a visionary, but really it's a hell of a thing.