Douglas Engelbart
Doug's digital footprint is rather large and spans 50 years. You can begin by reading his papers, from his original proposals from the 1960s to summaries from the 2000s. You can watch videos of his talks from the "mother of all demos" in 1968 to a 2008 tribute at Stanford.
Big Ideas
In this section, I'll try to summarize the big ideas gleaned from Engelbart.
C Activities
- A Activities are the core activities of the business. For Lambda School, that would be teaching classes, sourcing jobs for students, admissions, etc.
- B Activities are activities that improve the ability of the company to perform A Activities. For Lambda School, that would be the Product/Engineering squads that work with each organization - they build new systems that
- C Activities are activities that improve our capabilities for improvement. The Lambda School example would be the platform team themselves, building "paved roads" that allows our B Activity Teams to more productively improve their work.
When I engage in "meta-work", it's often "C Activity" work. Also, building a framework like RedwoodJS or Croquet is very much "C Activity".
References
Papers
Of all of his papers, the two that have been most recommended to me are:
- The most famous report is a longer Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework from October 1962.
- A useful reference while reading this paper may be Field Guide to Doug's 1962 Framework Report.
- A summary of his framework, 40 years later, called Improving Our Ability to Improve: A Call for Investment in a New Future from September 2003.
Video - Improving How We Improve - Doug Engelbart at Groupware '92
Talk: YouTube
Lots of interesting ideas in this talk. May need to watch it a few more times in order to really get it. Need to document more.
Other References:
- Broad Overview: https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/248/260/
- Summary: https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/115/000/