Initial Draft DOUG Initial Draft

 

The name ‘DOUG’ is an acronym for ‘dialogue for Online UnderstandinG’ and is of course a nod to Doug Engelbart who influenced us immensely. An 'audio glossary' is available on this site as a guide to some aspects of his thinking: audio glossary

 

This project is ambitious and it will take real work to gather the right requirements–let alone the means to implement it–so it will be worked on after we develop our own initial basic blogging collaboration tool Journal since the record of the work is as important as the work itself and therefore we don't want to be using commercial systems any more than we have to, since the companies can go out of business or change their data access at any point.

 

 

Goal

 

  • The goal of the project is to collaboratively design a dialogue system in order to best carry out our own internal dialogue and that with others, in a powerfully flexible, open and robust way, to hel deal with issues of propaganda, fake news and information overload, in ways which will allow the user to better understand the material, to question it and to annotate and cite it.

 

 

Criteria. The system must provide

 

  • Powerful views for browsing
  • Powerful views for reading
  • Powerful views for thinking
  • Provide high resolution linking possibilities through robust addressing means
  • Journalling capabilities to reliably store our dialogue records
  • Flexible means to add to the system, such as through different software systems and interaction styles
  • Flexible means to access the system

 

 

Constraints. The system must

 

  • Interoperate with general knowledge work systems as much as possible
  • Provide the advanced functionality outlined in the Criteria and they must be somehow encapsulated as much as possible when entered into external systems
  • Archive richly and bare-bones continually in formats which will be usefully interactable by anyone not using the system
  • Not be commercial so that if a company owning it or servicing it goes bust it's still available

 

 

Implementation

 

We will spend quality time working on what this should be and not simply rush into preconceived ideas of what should be built.

 

 

Inspirations/Initial Experiments: Dynamic Views

 

The Dynamic Views concept grew out of Liquid | Author but development has not started. If it is to become a Future Text project it would be released and Open Sourced as well: liquid.info/view.html This will likely be a core component of the DOUG project but implementation and experimentation will be necessary to determine where they fit.