What Do You Want To Ask Doug Engelbart?

(NOTE: If you have questions you’d like to ask Doug Engelbart, please leave them in the comments below and I’ll ask them to him next Tuesday.)

Next Tuesday, I’m going to be sitting down for a conversation with Doug Engelbart leading up to his presentation at MIT on May 17th, entitled “The Augmentation of our Collective IQ.” The audio of the conversation will be made available as a podcast. (Immeasurable thanks to Mei Lin Fung for setting this up.)

Doug is a legend of the industry. Just the first paragraph of his Wikipedia entry is filled with a compendium of the contributions he’s made:

“Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart (born January 30, 1925 in Oregon) is an American inventor of Swedish and Norwegian descent. He is best known for inventing the computer mouse (in a joint effort with Bill English); as a pioneer of human-computer interaction whose team developed hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs; and as a committed and vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and networks to help cope with the world’s increasingly more urgent and complex problems (which Horst W. J. Rittel and others since have called wicked problems).”

Doug’s current research is focused around the idea of “Collective IQ.” A bit more on that front:

“Today, his contributions are more widely recognized, but for decades the technologies he invented and demonstrated were largely ignored or misunderstood. And even now, with PC’s and the World Wide Web as direct descendants of his pioneering work, these technologies have not had nearly the transformative effect that Dr. Engelbart had hoped.

Until recently most of his inventions, as the industry gradually adopted them, were built into stand-alone computers. But from the beginning Dr. Engelbart conceived his techniques with networked computers in mind. His motivating concept, still largely untested today, was that information technologies could serve as the connective tissue between people and information.

The result, he said, would be an exponential increase in what he calls an organization’s “collective I.Q.,” which would in turn supercharge a group’s ability to improve itself over time.

In essence, Dr. Engelbart’s theory separates work into three categories. A-work, as he calls it, is the primary mission of an organization, like building cars or operating a health care system. B-work involves ways of improving A-work, and it is likely to be basically the same among similar organizations, be they auto makers or hospitals.

C-work, in turn, is about improving the improvement process itself. Although an auto maker might be loath to share information about B-work with its competitors, Dr. Engelbart’s hypothesis is that much good could come from their sharing information about C-work — about how to improve the process of recording and responding to consumer complaints, for example, which might enhance processes all the way down the line.

And that exercise might be equally valuable to a software company, a car maker or a bookstore — resulting in what he calls “high-performance organizations” that are much more capable of improving their work processes quickly and effectively.”

What questions would you like to ask Doug about Collective IQ, or anything else?