Douglas Engelbart has had a profound impact on the world. Engelbart is often mentioned in the company of thinkers like Vannevar Bush, and Alan Turing to name a few. He was the inventor of the mouse, which changed the way we interact with a computer, was an early creator of hypermedia, and groupware. Douglas Engelbart is a true visionary in every sense of the word. He is often given credit for: the mouse, windows, hypertext, designer of "electronic mail", interactive hypermedia, teleconferencing, and other computer technology. Many of these innovations, which have influenced education as well as increased participation in computers, took years to find practical uses. He is a graduate of Oregon State University and of UCLA. Alan Kay and Steve Jobs were strongly influenced by Engelbart.

As Principal Investigator at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) starting in the mid-sixties, Dr. Engelbart led his research group in the development of the On-Line System (NLS), with tools to support asynchronous use by project collaborators.

Douglas Engelbart is the founder and director of the bootstrap institute, whose focus is on creating high-performance organizations through collaboration, and involvement. The mission statement of the bootstrap institute is to: Promote awareness of the scale, urgency, and complexity of the challenges we face; Catalyze, launch, and shepherd an active, strategic pursuit of boosting the Collective IQ on a scale commensurate with the rate, scale, and pervasiveness of change; Create an exploratory environment where participants can collaborate, experiment, and set in motion advanced pilot outposts in diverse application areas; Enable a whole new way of thinking about the way we work, learn, and live together; Promote development of Collective IQ among, within and by networked improvement communities; Cultivate a knowledge environment which includes a shared dynamic knowledge repository; Foster development of an open platform information system infrastructure, based on an Open Hyperdocument Systems (OHS) framework; Share the A-B-C's of Bootstrapping and support co-evolution of human organizations and their tools; Enable sharing of effort, cost and risks of advanced exploration among a diverse set of organizations and improvement communities; Push the scaling of bootstrapping towards what could become National Improvement Infrastructures, as well as a Global Improvement Infrastructure. (online).

The way Doug Engelbart perceives it (from Bootstrap.org):

• Our world is a complex place with urgent problems of a global scale. 3A1
• The rate, scale, and complex nature of change is unprecedented and beyond the capability of any one person, organization, or even nation to comprehend and respond to.
• Challenges of an exponential scale require an evolutionary coping strategy of a commensurate scale at a cooperative cross-disciplinary, international, cross-cultural level.
• We need a new, co-evolutionary environment capable of handling simultaneous complex social, technical, and economic changes at an appropriate rate and scale.
• The grand challenge is to boost the collective IQ* of organizations and of society. A successful effort brings about an improved capacity for addressing any other grand challenge.
• The improvements gained and applied in their own pursuit will accelerate the improvement of collective IQ. This is a bootstrapping strategy.
• Those organizations, communities, institutions, and nations that successfully bootstrap their collective IQ will achieve the highest levels of performance and success.

Books

A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentatoin of Man's Intellect.