Summaries of Doug@50 Calls by Stephan Kreutzer, Marc-Antoine Parent, Frode Hegland, Gyuri Lajos (short story to read TXT) 📖

Preface

After Douglas Carl Engelbart passed away in July 2013, a group of people got together to continue Engelbart’s invisible revolution (the historical retrospective settled on calling the revolution unfinished). With the 50th anniversary of the Great 1968 Demo coming up on the 2018-12-09, planning began to create a new, modern demo which would inspire and invite such work, research and bootstrapping to be picked up again for our time. After some years passed, from the 2017-11-08 on, a series of regular online calls were conducted. What follows are the summaries of a few of them.

Weekly Call 2018-01-31

In this call, we discussed how TopicQuest, IdeaLoom, Author and SymbolSpace could interoperate. At least the first three turned out to be similar in terms of the capability they provide, with other components missing like a visualization component and maybe translators/converters in between.

Weekly Call 2018-02-21

Frode Hegland informed the group that he was invited as a speaker to the 7th International Summit of the Book in Baku, Azerbaijan. We found it unrealistic to prepare a demo in the short amount of time that remains until then. Marc-Antoine Parent deepened our understanding of knowledge maps, and as Frode prepared a proposal for adding new terms to the HyperGlossary, we discussed how the controls for entering data might relate to knowledge maps and what the use of it could be. Loránd Kedves gave an overview about his work which led to questions how it might fit into the big picture of programming and linked data.

Weekly Call 2018-03-07

There’s a new Google Spreadsheet with our project list in it. The discussion went towards more basic system functionality/capabilities as some of the main scenarios, HyperGlossary, Socratic Authoring and ViewSpecs, would require them to be in place. Specifically URLs were of interest as they’re used by Christopher Gutteridge’s ultralink. Vint Cerf introduced the need for archiving as an intrinsic system capability. Andrew Pam shared some experience about working with e-mail, from which especially IdeaLoom could benefit. Memento and IPFS were mentioned, we need to look into both. We also realized that our onboarding needs improvement.

Weekly Call 2018-03-14

In preparation of the call, Frode Hegland provided the abstract for his presentation for the upcoming International Summit of the Book 2018. Even before the official start time, some members of the group discussed things like Slack features or separation of GUI and data, so a chat like IRC could still look good, which too would power ViewSpecs and key commands.

At the scheduled time, Marc-Antoine Parent explained the new interoperability format that’s designed to help our components with talking to each other in more detail, but then Frode pointed out that it seems to be geared towards knowledge graphs, not documents. Marc-Antoine suggested that WebAnnotation could link both together. Furthermore, a lot of structural requirements could be expressed in HTML, as far as documents are concerned. By gaining more understanding about the nature of both perspectives, “media fragments” came into focus. For structural/semantic references in non-HTML documents, the group wondered how to go about it, Utopia Documents were mentioned.

With this broad range of topics on the table, Houria Iderkou, from a project management standpoint, proposed to partition those discussions into subcommittees, as the weekly call tends to attract quite a lot of general, conceptual brainstorming and discussion, but we make little progress with the specific projects/components. There could also be two calls, one for the general discussion and one for working on and coordinating the actual components for the demo. Three months in, we didn’t make enough progress for what’s needed to end up with something presentable. We acknowledged that we

Text: Copyright 2018-2021 Stephan Kreutzer, Marc-Antoine Parent, Frode Hegland, Gyuri Lajos, Robert Cunningham. This text is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License 3 + any later version and/or the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
Editing: Stephan Kreutzer
Layout: Stephan Kreutzer
Publication Date: 11-01-2020

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