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hi I'm Jeffrey Olufsen and I met dougie in 1965 at the fall joint computer conference walked by met him listen to him I lived in Seattle at the time went
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didn't go home went ASR I got accepted for a job went up and announced to my wife I was moving to Menlo Park and I've been working with Doug ever since off
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and on so you're gonna do slides is that right okay so let's start out I'm just gonna ask him some questions curses whenever I talk about it the
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technology we did he was really a key guy coming to me in the late 60s and really part of how we built the whole system so he was the key there so let's
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talk about the original dream son is I remember you telling me about it back in even in the early 50s you had this vision that computers were gonna be the
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media is that right well it started out I got engaged in the next Monday of driving to work I was working at Ames Laboratory at Moffett Field and suddenly
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started thinking boy now that I'm going to get engaged I better start thinking about my career and I realized I had no real goal in my career just an interesting job oh so for the next few weeks I started
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thinking about oh and somehow it turned into say how could you contribute something that would be the most meaningful to the world oh wow okay and that took me like four months
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and then it came out to finally realizing that the world's problems were just really really very complex and what would be very very valuable is if we got better better ways for us collectively
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to understand the scope and nature of the problems and the potentials for the solution oh okay so that's what started this whole thing and I I wanted I
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decided to go and use computers and so I quit my job and went up to Berkeley where they had a research project to build a computer and it had been underway for like three years and I was
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there five years and it still wasn't finished by that time it was a great big room full of stuff but anyway so I would got in the computer field very early and to talk in those days about interacting
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with a computer was just so laughable another question yes well let's stay on the same thing so so is it I understand that your idea about getting information
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documents media into the computers was not so much about making them look better or look prettier or fancier but
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to put in structure for accessing to do things to them so good you could access the information is that right yeah that got there that the hyperlinks one thing
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to be able to be able to point to things specifically but then you like to point to them so specifically that it's this particular passage not just this document so we got the address ability down like that so we're putting
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structure into the documents so that you could link accurately and accurate in also the the viewing that I realized that one thing the computer offered you is hey you don't have to just look like
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a page of a book the computer could give you all sorts of optional views of the same material and for some of your purposes of looking at it one view would be better than another so I think at two
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parts it said where to go and it said how to transform stuff when you get there how to produce the view how to produce did we call it the view spec in specifications right and that's been
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missing since then which seems to me is it's kind of like too bad cuz it added a certain amount of power the hugga hugga transform head part has been missing
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yeah go there and look while you could say go there and look I want to see the first line of all the next five paragraphs like that and then you then when you were there the mobility and jumping and moving
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around that she also changed views with every jump so it just made a really different environment about how you use something online to study and I used to
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tell people hey this this is what's going to make books become obsolete and because you can so much more mobile and moving around and looking at different ways of viewing only show me the first
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two lines of the paragraphs from here on that contain this phrase or this word or something like this so that would just became a standard so your emphasis was sort of much more on on stepping away
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from a classic page view to a dynamic structured linkable viewable kind of object exactly okay let's switch gears a little bit so we had to build a lot of
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stuff to do that a lot of computer tools to make new segments we because he was the key and you had this have this idea
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of bootstrapping and and you want to talk a little bit about the tools and bootstrapping and and how that fits together sure the basic idea I start talking
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about back in the 50s was augmenting augmenting our human intellect and later augmenting our collective IQ and by augmenting it's just how do you facilitate the increased capability of
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doing them and this gave me a whole picture about how since the beginning of recorded history the records and everything like that hey we got to start doing writing and more and more things
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we started doing that we're really augmenting our capability to think to indicate and reason and hey the computers seen Damita instead of automating what we used to do could
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augment us further and this did go over very well in the early days like that that's why I went to Berkeley to get a PhD they they were the only ones in the
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area doing any research and computers and but why buy time I got my PhD was trying to talk about this I got laughed
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no.11 friendly professor in a different kind of Department listen to me one day and said you know if you keep talking like this you'll be an acting assistant professor forever and I believed him
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because how cookie can you sound and I even tried Stanford and no they didn't clear that computers were never going to be an academic thing that they were only
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a service activity and that be the way they'd be treated in the university yeah so I have the real story there - I was a graduate student at the time and I was not allowed to do a PhD about this stuff
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because it wasn't theoretical enough so let's just stress a little bit more on bootstrapping so yeah so bootstrapping is is when I'm building tools to
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structure these documents and and view them in different ways I'm using the tools that I'm building to continue building better tools there right there's an old fable about some guy that
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learned how that he could by seeing farther wanting to Daddy grab the straps of his boots and lift himself up in the air so that was an old fable that wrangle my head so I just got to saying
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that hey if we start being able to augment our reasoning and our memory etc more capably hey better we get at that if we start using it ourselves to get better the better we get the better
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we'll get that getting better then so it's just like bootstrapping and so this idea of network improvement communities is groups individual groups bootstrapping somehow networking
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together to get a more collective bootstrapping yeah and that's just the way it be like something in Google's products are something that that augment
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Google's product developers all the better and marketing people hey the better they get at their product the better they're going to get at getting new product and it be fun to
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look at it a little bit that there are things about studying documents that we did by partitioning and they're different viewing and moving around reflects me within the documents that
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it'd be really fun to see Google get turned by hey let's let's really focus on capability you know rather specific sense and how is it that people can read
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not only just find the relevant documents but then study and read and integrate them into a composite whole document that parts of trying to okay okay I guess Duggars asked me to
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give the Google response to some of his ideas and so these are his slides that I'll be talking to in reacting to you can read them as they come up and and I'll give our reaction okay so he's
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talked about this idea of augmentation and I like this distinction of the human systems and the tool systems and I think you know some people make the error of
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concentrating too much in one area of saying well we can solve everything by building a tool or well people can do it all on their own and it's really when you put them together in the right way
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that I think is the most powerful and and here we see that there is a science behind it the science of sensory perceptual motor mental and so on so don't worry there is room to do one or
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more PhDs here there's a lot going on but is putting it all together that's the hard part okay so it so this slide talks about this idea of improvement so it's one
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thing to have the right tools to build a static model of some knowledge or a community that works together but what Doug's trying to get at here is this notion of a continually improving
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community and you know you see this a lot it's one of these business fads of continual improvement and you see it in in the way we do debugging and I think
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that's that's really the right model to look at so when we find a bug well the first thing you do is is fix it but if you stop there you're never going to get rid of your bucks instead the next thing
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you have to say is well where did this bug come from are there others like it and then you search throughout the codebase and try to find others in a pre-emptive fashion rather than waiting for them to bite you
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again and then the third thing you do is say well how could I have avoided this in the first place could I have been using different tools different methodologies it's different programming languages or whatever so that these bugs
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hadn't come up in the first place and so it's just this abcs model of trying to do this improvement at each level and
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this applies to to various organizations and in order to have an effective organization you need this to in breed this idea of continual improvement okay
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and here he's talking about the idea of dynamic knowledge repository to store this so it's one thing to have the notion that were expected to make improvements but it's another to write
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that down in such a way that that could be shared so not only am i continually improving but everybody else in the organization can can do that as well and we can talk about this at a horizontal
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level so not only at a vertical level within a company but also at a horizontal level saying you know there are things that are pre competitive that you can share with other companies with academics with interested individuals
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and if you're all trying to improve on the same problem there's no reason you can't share that kind of knowledge obviously though they'll always be individual organizations that have parts they want to keep secret that won't be
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part of the shared knowledge repository but there are other parts that people are willing to share we can build them up we can all improve faster let's see yeah so just more on that
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why don't I hand it back to you guys so let's see it's different than the slide I have it's the same slide it just looks
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different okay so Doug how we gonna explain Kodiak briefly well what's a knowledge repository yeah we moved a
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little faster but just assuming that if any sizable group is going to try to build its collective understanding you probably have to get some common way in which you've done the best you can to
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aggregate the knowledge about it resolve the conflicts of it etc like this so the dynamic term means that generally speaking it's always evolving
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and growing and so to me it's the core if you're going to get collectively smarter is it sort of like the understanding your head isn't a whole bunch of fragments it's gotta be some
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coherent so we could build knowledge repositories about lots of stuff the world could global warming absolutely genetics what deep what in your mind is the most fundamental knowledge
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repository the one that describes how you build knowledge repositories that that's the term one comes out of bootstrapping you know the better you get at building repositories that are
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probably going to be the better you get it improving your ability so your vision would be groups of people bootstrapping collaboratively building knowledge
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repositories about building knowledge repositories weld it of course you look at the whole commitment your whole society out there going a core part of that should be working on hey repositories about how you do better
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repository isn't for the rest of them putting them to work and some of them are like Oh global warming oh well okay how do you build a repository that gives you the best coherent picture of the status of that
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including the potentials for correcting the procedures changing our world so we get rid of that in a sense the root the very fundamental one is a generic one about how to build knowledge
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repositories in general and that and if you had groups of people participating in that that's really an improvement community yeah and antennae I I said there are lots of
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improvement community is already working in the world every professional society and so on I call a network one in which they're adopting these new networking ways of augmenting or capability to do
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that okay so so how do you do bootstrapping I think it's it's simple feedback loop you
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start with what you know you put it into a format that can be easily shared and improved on and then you work to make it better than you make part of that format
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the the improvements in the process and of course you can do this across lots of different capabilities Doug said the most important one is how you make improvements in the process itself but
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then there's all these other application areas and there could be sharing between them as well where should your organization head I went rep by what route you know I think that's a problem that everybody faces
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and we don't know we have to figure out how to explore how to go in the right direction and you get together command and so I guess part of the point is sharing as much as you can and more
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people you have looking at it maybe the better results you can have if you have the right tool and then Google might be proudly say okay we're doing a lot to help people find things out on that front error and okay but then who's
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doing the job of really making better Maps understanding the footcare yeah so I think that's right in fact that's one of the things that that Google is looking at now is trying to change from
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a model where every query is sort of independent you do a search you get the results but that's something only you've done to one where we can share some of that and so we have some of these products now that are starting to put
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together Mark's notebooks and so on where you can share some of your search experience and republish that in a way that other people can find them and I think we need
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to do more of that okay so we're gonna talk a little bit about human and tool systems together so what are some of the human systems in here what would be an example well human
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system is just what organizes these people brings them together the conventions and the rules and the very language we use to work together etc so all of it all of that is there and then
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tool system well I think we've got this projector and the chairs a lot of things like this that facilitate what we're trying to do the coevolution of all of those things so let's talk about the
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coevolution a little bit I think the idea is that maybe you get some new computer tools and that changes your human tools a little bit and then that changes your computer tools the human processes and methods and language and
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all of that apart of the human and they change interactively with the tool systems and so then you'd say well those things
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together represent what augments the basic capability you start out with a naked person that has no education at all Wow what does it take to turn it into some
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very efficient contributor to society like you people so we'd expect a bootstrapping community to actually have very different organization and even
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language words and ways of working that are substantially different from the non bootstrapping communities well that's that's a really good candidate place to
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get but just because they're bootstrapping maybe just be haven't even gotten off the ground yet so the process there's more important right now to think about than the actual state that
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they'd be in but how do you get so that you really can pick up knowledge and integrate it so if what you say if we take all the knowledge that's existing in this room and integrate it so that it
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was available and usable high-quality by everybody is there any known process you can think of that can do it well but what would be the value it was just
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a huge value in that one and so to me that was what the potential that the computer and the hypermedia and the web etc were there to offers could start
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really building knowledge of posit or ease that were really significantly growing coherent you know they're already been verified all the things in there or some of the things that we who hadn't been verified yet but we're
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hypotheses were clearly there anyway online so that's what I and I think the next slide goes back to the point we were making about an open hyper document
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let's let's just re-emphasize the point debt dad you you had you have really stressed putting structure into the documents so that they're more finally
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accurately accessible and also viewable if you could just say a little bit more about viewing dynamics rather than thinking of things as pages sure you
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know pages totally artificial but it's got a screen one thing you have to carve it on a stone it's so just to try to think of you know we have our visual
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machinery here and behind that is what they call a perceptual machine meet in your head and then tying to all of the things who are understanding of built into different parts your heads but when
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you realize what what happens if you just look at something like this sheet this projection or something the beautiful machinery that just grabs it
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and puts in some kind of conceptual framework in your mind and it says boy that's really great well that machinery
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evolved you know way way way back and so we think we're very proud about what we do but have we really built ways to portray material for ourselves etc that make best use to the machinery that's
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there you know a the the book came out after printing and writing which were marvelous things to be able to use in this perceptual machinery that can scan along a line and the words pop right out
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to it well so we got books and all of that but now with this new technology what is it we could do to feed that kind of machinery we've got there and not just
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not just emulate the old paper that's tough so in fact in any nls documents everything is working ice is a tree rather than age and I can zoom in and
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out on the document of him zoom how much of each node in the tree I see and that collapse it and actually in fact linked together streams of nodes in different orders not necessarily a sort
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of a natural unwinding water all right so there's lots of different organizations to the same set of text so we we had those things working and that I guess late 60's and then when the
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people like the Xerox PARC cruel came out and were really ready to go and had a lot of PR behind them as such and then the people at Stanford in human
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human-computer interaction and the people all over the country in that form like this somehow that Amanda had to follow that saying it's got to be simple
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to use and easy to learn the real users of secretary is what really got me instead of like this and so they turned and looked at the things we were doing with all this optional viewing and jumping mobility that I would just love
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to see some real study going about the increased capabilities that gave people to study and communicate but it just got pushed right off the table because it violated the prevailing perceptions
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about things that got to be easy to learn and natural reviews and I'd ask them well let's see you still ride a tricycle and what do you mean I say well that's easy to learn and a
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bicycle is actually very hard to learn in fact I used to do so many bicycle tricks and such women we grew up out in the country I could run backwards and I could stand up there's handlebars here and the bars
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coming back of a seat up there and I can stand up and cross my heels underneath the seat block my calves against the seat and stand up and coast down hills and stir like this so how do you do that
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see well it's something you human can learn how to do and most people don't know how you ride a bicycle without any hands sometimes be fun to tell you but anyway there there are things that
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humans can do that that if you don't back up a little ways and say hey if you realize what it is that you're learning machinery and had to do to get you this far and how really marvelous it is from
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learning to read and write and all the other things that go on you do something naturally that was for without that it'd be the whole society would crash so we
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expect children to learn and yet just business about things being they have to be easy to learn and naturally use you've also had some frustration with wysiwyg right
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like how it go ahead say what you see is what you get huh this was the emphasis on making things look like there are pages in a book rather than building in the structure
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necessary to index them and link them so anyway it what's going but but there's a very basic thing about paradigms you know what are the prevailing ways in which people view
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different aspects of our society in our life etc they get set into a paradigm and if it's something that's different from that it's a really a strong habit comes up up you're telling it pushing
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away and I could tell you that the things you take for granted and work interacting with your computer every day would have been rejected like that in the 60s just note to our own
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so anyway times that has to change and so how do you how to help cultivate a change which brings about more capability into our world okay so here
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Doug's talking about the open hyper document system which is an idea he's at for for many years and in different names and forms I guess one of the questions is is to ask how does this
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compare to what we have as the web today which has some of these attributes but not all of them is talking about how to
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get this going you know what what are the parts that we're missing and then it seems like the the main part is the that we want to add is is the sub
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addressability of structured pieces of documents so right now we have URLs but you can't really pick out a piece of a document and we're already seeing places where this is a limitation and so
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you know google hasn't found a way to go beyond that in terms of linking into a paragraph but in the types of media that we have some control over you see that we we are going in that direction so you
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can now put on your web page a map where you get to link to some parts of it or a video where you can figure out a starting point for the frame so in these
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sorts of rich media there is a need for sub addressing them and we worked out controls for that somehow it's never happened for URLs for some reason I can't understand and I remember back in
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1991 I had an intern Mark Torrance who came up with a proposal for saying well let's use the question mark after the end of the URL to be able to address into a paragraph or a substring or
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something and he proposed that w3c and here we are 15 years later and it hasn't been adopted I can't understand why and that certainly seems like like one thing that we need the other part of it the
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Doug is talked about is the need for links going back and forth for this kind of central repository for links I'm not as convinced that that's as crucial it seems like the web works okay
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even though things occasionally break and people seem to route around that that kind of a problem and here he's talking about the capability to see different sorts of views on a file to be
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able to share the responsibility between the author of the file for presenting it one way and the reader to consume it in the way that they want we have some of
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that capability today with CSS so you have the capability to override the author CSS and the way you want to in greasemonkey you could do a lot of things that duck wants to be able to do
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although that hasn't widely been adopted yet here we're talking about the league database having that be more of a database than it is now where things are
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constantly breaking well for instance why can't you look at a document and ask hey from a given community who's pointing has any links
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pointing in into this and oh when I see a link pointing into it I'd like to be able to to see where the sources or back
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link on it those kind of extended capabilities are just sitting there waiting yeah so again this is something where you see happening in restricted types of domains but but not in general
00:31:31
so in blog posts the various blog mechanisms have easy ways for you to say here are others that are linking to this blog but you don't have an easy generalized way of doing that for web
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content in general well mish sure how they go through these let's we're also running out of time for questions so let's let's Doug what would
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you like Google to do what do you want to do what if you if you had a magic wand and you could get them working on a project but what kind of thing would you
00:32:13
have the working on I like that I'd like to get him to sort of see how in some sensible progressive way they could start extending the capabilities that they offer to their users they would
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start including these things so we did have it have it break away from books and pages and stuff like that and have dynamic structures it would have all of the linking stuff
00:32:39
right and the viewing but it would also have a dynamic knowledge repository well there are ways that a little hard to describe with our hands about how how
00:32:51
you could put together a new kind of knowledge repositories with the structures we're talking about the linked linked parts because until you have those structures until you're
00:33:05
starting the bootstrap process you can't really do one without the other yeah and they just build in bootstrap would they get other people going along with
00:33:16
them well it seemed to me that it certainly be reasonable thing to do is just start offering extensions to what they all now have and the first part
00:33:28
could be some that would be very useful to their own internal activities but as a extra sort of service outside that can really grow for instance how about you know
00:33:43
supporting some research in how the studying could increase in efficiency if you have all these optional views to shift between and there's one view I know that Google would be very good at
00:33:56
because I'm assuming that they got some very powerful syntactic and now analyzers out there going but I've been dreaming for 25 years about saying how could the one way of reading it be like this that the different syntactic parts
00:34:09
of speech would be in different colors and then you could say oh I only want to see these three parts of speech at all because that let me scan for where I
00:34:22
know this article could begin doing serious talk about again an issue or something they've got all the machinery to analyze that I'm assuming because of
00:34:32
the way they do their searches but and there's more from there okay so where do you want to go from here
00:34:45
you want to do questions okay okay I'm Ellen song I've been whether you've dug for a while we are really really interested engaging ask questions we've got mics we've exposed you to a
00:35:02
lot of material the background behind it is in the papers and their links got the PowerPoint downloaded you you have all the references we are so interested to hear what what you have to say in
00:35:16
response to this call to action any comments questions but one thing that went by in passing that I thought was really crucial I was
00:35:37
wondering if you could discuss is that right now the collaborative knowledge accumulation media and we've been evolving on the web our vert is very good at capturing
00:35:50
consensus knowledge like Wikipedia when people agree on things it's very good at collaboratively capturing the state of agreement but it seems like a lot of the important knowledge to capture represent
00:36:03
well and think about is the state of disagreement is the the knowledge in live controversies and one thing that went by very quickly right there yeah our arguments structuring and graphical
00:36:16
portrayal of arguments and reference to the the issue based information system I think that that's a wide open area I think that that you know the web is poised in a good position to be able to
00:36:29
evolve towards taking on this problem but I think it's an important problem so and so your thoughts on that would be good are you acquainted with things they've been going on for almost 20 years on that issue based and structured
00:36:42
argumentation anyway it's it's it's sitting there to support help and I don't know how relevant it is to any of
00:36:55
the majors hopes for Google to be and then future business but anyway supporting that would just be marvelous because the way the way it could be that's saying I want to see the
00:37:07
most relevant argument not it was data but the data coming from the most relevant argument or anyway so that's what the linking and such and then different viewing where you
00:37:24
actually see structure graphical structure so could you envision if things weren't in sort of page orientation but we're in a more how in a
00:37:38
more structured orientation we could capture capture arguments about things well you can all you can be by pointing to different places and if they're a way to say I'm talking about this this this
00:37:52
part of that document more accurately but even just pointing to the key statement or something gets a lot to it put it but building really coherent
00:38:05
arguments structuring that people can follow through seems to me just to be a hugely critical high potential thing and Google would have the resources to do it
00:38:17
struggle with its evolution then it would just add a huge amount to social value if it contribute another questions oh yeah to what degree do you think Wikipedia solves some of
00:38:36
the what degree do you think Wikipedia provides some of the functionality that you've been saying there's a need for and to a degree you think that it might have some near misses or some things that it doesn't do but easily could to
00:38:50
address the needs that you've talked about somehow and I had difficulty understanding it asking how much Wikipedia meets what you want well it's
00:39:04
um really understand start that's that's all it doesn't really offer you dynamic views right you know if the way it's put out it could be structured in ways that
00:39:18
help you look at that and study and then I don't really follow it enough to be able to be critical to critical about I mean have two definite ways what I'd say
00:39:37
can do it but it's it's certainly an impressive start there's another aspect of things like Wikipedia that go back and ducks history a long time and all of these things
00:39:49
you're still you know when you edit in Wikipedia you're editing a text file and then somehow you generate a display out of that and in NLS and the system's Doug is proposing you edit the structure
00:40:02
directly and and the different views did you get or generated out of the structure so in fact when we had all all the programming languages that were in nls there was no text file for the
00:40:14
programs they were in the dynamic structure where the dynamic structure of the programming language was the dynamic structure of the document and it's just it's a different world
00:40:27
he he had to struggle with getting the programming language evolved and adapted into that so he knows I'd like to go
00:40:39
back to that question so I think there's a concept that I get get from working with tag that the ultimate representation is how it is in our minds what we're really trying to have is something which provides the links and the arguments
00:40:52
what's my plane what's the warrant for the claim to be able to show that and then the text display is just a text is a presentation of the underlying argument and I think Wikipedia is a
00:41:05
display mechanism first Doug is really talking about some of the logic but not just straight follow logic but how people make arguments yes
00:41:21
okay so if this these concepts are really useful why I have in CNN New York Times nature I mean there are plenty of media content providers out there and they should have a huge competitive
00:41:34
advantage I would think if they started delivering content differently so what are some of the barriers that have determined the state of affairs now you need to speak oh he says I'm okay
00:41:50
the well this is a place where I get very foggy fuzzy because I haven't been able to understand why people have rejected it so consistently fall through
00:42:04
these years these different ways of portraying our knowledge and and using it and you know I hate to think about giving up but in a sense I haven't been
00:42:18
out there trying to sell it because I was a part of this actually so having implemented in LS I went up to Xerox PARC and actually did part of Bravo with
00:42:32
Simoni and I don't want to say it was because apart but the world became fixated on pages and and all these ideas were very alive
00:42:45
and dynamic in 1970 1971 and then when the Altos started and we got the laser printers going we just took a giant leap back onto pages and stayed there we're in my sense we're still stuck we've never come out
00:43:00
of it I think when Doug says let us fly let's fly off the page really because we're stuck there in an old paradigm think about it before there was writing and
00:43:12
reading it's hard to learn to read it's a struggle what Doug is saying is that it's worth the effort to go off the page but we've been stuck on the page and it's a natural thing it took time before
00:43:26
reading and writing went out into the culture it says only the priest did it now everybody gets to learn to read and write Doug would like to have everyone learn to fly in this way
00:43:39
please I had to go back to the Wikipedia and questioned Wikipedia right now has some movement stored in semantic constructs into the pages so that means for example
00:43:54
if you describe a book then you have a way to describe with the part of the book title book and so on so is that a closer across I mean a step closer to what you are dreaming of I haven't been
00:44:08
keeping keeping up with that so I don't know exactly what it is but it sounds like a move in the right direction yeah I'll go home and look at it thank
00:44:20
you next question we passed over a slide at the very end that was kind of interesting that seemed to mark a difference between hawea how the internet organizes information and how we actually organize information like on
00:44:38
our desk or in our life yes so are you saying there is a difference between the way we actually interact with content on the Internet as opposed to the way that
00:44:53
we naturally would best interacts with the Internet so is there I mean we talked about or you're talking about jumping away from the webpage do you feel like there's actually like a different structure that we should be
00:45:07
taking in or a different way that we should be taking in information that you know we've imposed this very unnatural structure on the internet due to commerce or laziness or resources at the
00:45:18
time and and it's just hard to imagine what do you mean by getting away from the webpage is there actually a different visual format that we could take in information or is it mainly ratios
00:45:33
well the first thing that why this getting the book out of ancient ties to book a book orientation get rid of them
00:45:45
and Jeff just had a comment box Blissett references embedding all documents inside documents in you have a much more flexible way that you can actually get aggregations of knowledge put together
00:45:59
and like this and the way if you're if you've got some kind of argument about something you can actually grab you know these phrases from that one and put them
00:46:12
here and then when we people read it they can it can be shown that this does come from there and they can go back and look at it if they want to and there's a
00:46:24
whole movement for the last twenty or twenty years called structured argumentation that is extremely a significant kind of
00:46:37
thing that you know this phrase and to this thing they together make an allegation about this and this is countered by this and this is
00:46:48
unsupported you know so one of the ideas here is if a link can point to us fine chunk of stuff in the middle of something rather than a whole thing now
00:47:02
you can have the idea of having that link displayed in context and the thing that you're looking at rather than being a link right and then inside that kind of then if you make up some rules for
00:47:14
yourself about these argument kinds of structures and how you're going to use a tree structure for example to represent various parts of an argument then then I construct my page that somebody reads
00:47:28
out of the pages of other people but the reader doesn't do any link following just for example we had a function inside of this augment system called include and it would say include you
00:47:42
know this paragraph or something in a set of these things and you could see what to include you could jump on the link go look but then one view spec here I want to just show it with all the
00:47:53
inclusions included and this guy we just were exploring this in the last days of the activity but does a lot one can do about that and
00:48:06
these are just examples made if you sit and brainstorm with yourself you'll think about these things instantly let me give a business example Doug's ideas about open hyper documents to some degree were inspired by his look here he
00:48:18
was with McDonnell Douglas for a while weather so the 6,000 suppliers a lot of people involved in manufacturing aircraft so if you think of the idea of a purchase order I just saw there there's a counting view of it who
00:48:30
approved in how much it was and so on there's also the engineering spec view of it which is where does it fit further as a component fit when is where the things going to be shipped when are we going to run out there's many views of
00:48:42
the concept of purchase order different people need to see that in different ways more questions perhaps one of the challenges related to
00:48:55
this has to do with authoring of information I can understand how a reader of information if you just have abstract information there's no way for someone to read it there's got to be some kind of a representation it's got
00:49:09
to be rendered or displayed somehow so that someone can consume it okay that's obvious but let's look about the challenge of authoring information someone can't take a piece of knowledge
00:49:21
from their head and put it into a form that other people's can access it without creating a representation without and the easiest way to do this is to slap it on a page and once you've
00:49:34
done that it's no longer abstract so is authoring one of the particular challenges of coming up with this sort of representation less abstract
00:49:44
information well I mean you talk about augmenting different capabilities that's definitely a capability that deserves augmentations and and
00:49:59
sort of the agreements and the conventions and the actual practices and the tools all of these things augment and so I think that the whole business
00:50:10
of generating information having contained the arguments that shift and grow and stuff until after they've gone through a stuff you'd never recognize it from the first what was there but but
00:50:23
then somebody comes up to something new and you got to be able to reconstruct come back and see what it was an arrogant stage so all this computer support thing offers just huge new ways
00:50:36
of having that happen you know what was actually the sort of stages of the evolution of the concepts and the arguments etc and suddenly they find someplace in the middle that's a
00:50:49
question boy you know it's something like why you could grab it from there and grow anyway this is the kind of Dreams I've been floating with so many
00:51:04
years ago I actually worked hard to author documents which had multiple views and it's hard but you know it's
00:51:15
really a mental struggle but but maybe I was sort of the first person in the world to do this right and by the time you get to the 2 Millions one and we've had a lot of experience in society and we're teaching that it would be easy
00:51:27
so I think the issue here is to start the evolutionary process and delbet it's not so hard as companies are trying to get more customer centric and understanding the
00:51:42
perspective of a customer different customers views these these ideas are coming forward the the idea that Doug had is that within an improvement community there's a knowledge architect
00:51:54
who kind of works at some of the rules of how this works in which knowledge products are created which then are reusable by other people within the community think about issues where you
00:52:06
know that one part of the company knows this but the other company product the company doesn't know it they design something they roll it out and they say why didn't you ask us so for there to be a way to show what is going on for
00:52:18
people to author an insert comment before the full launch is done these are intelligence can collection being able to record dialogue today the way we record dialogue is with audio tape with
00:52:31
transcripts it's very slow how do we allow people to say okay we're launching this any comments come and make the comment right at the place that that it's relevant to in context more
00:52:45
questions it was mentioned here that some time ago only priests could read and write and now we have special cast of people computer programmers so I was saying that if not necessarily professional
00:53:03
programmers could head to the knowledge of a software process it would be a step forward talking about irrelevant arguments with no software ask
00:53:17
I couldn't understand that so it's about whether it was beyond professional programmers to more people being involved in structuring knowledge using knowledge other the question is when we
00:53:32
spoke about relevant argument and common IQ if not necessarily professional programmers would be able to add to the knowledge encoded in the software
00:53:45
process analogy was a long time ago only priests would read and write now we have a special caste computer software programmers guessing wildly I think
00:54:03
I think Doug I think you're very much in favor of its democratic a process in building dynamic knowledge repositories as possible right it's not it's not just
00:54:15
does assistant programmers that built it oh absolutely nothing personal but any last questions
00:54:40
well if we was in Google there got to be any kind of a group that said hey we'd like to struggle a little bit more and see whether this would have any relevance to
00:54:54
what Google could do and it would be really interesting because Google's made a position for itself from the world that if it really started trying to push for saying fewer ways with lakes and
00:55:09
vectors and whatever we can actually build argument structures that are sound and that can be challenged explicitly and the challenge can be challenged etc
00:55:21
and all of this structure and ongoing argument be really managed well and this could be a huge tribute to society so would you come and talk with them do you
00:55:32
like to talk to home people doing that kind of stuff boy I would I sure would because it well let's see go ahead we are having
00:55:54
lunch at the Casablanca room is that not and so if anybody would actually like to follow up and discuss this more this is why we're here really to dialogue there's always a contender
00:56:16
so thank you
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