Developing and communicating new ideas

What we are trying to achieve.

§1 I have had this project in development since mid-2004. It was born to “scratch my own itch,” as it were, because I am once again authoring a book that is both itself the vehicle for a difficult research project and necessarily needs to convey new and difficult ideas to a range of people with diverse backgrounds and disciplines.

§2 The project addresses a problem I have had repeatedly in my career.

§3 What is this problem exactly? Let me state the problem by telling you first what I do day-to-day.

§4 Right now I research and develop scientific materials, it is the work of a scholar. I develop new ideas and new technologies associated with successful ideas. I have been a part of several engineering teams. These have focused on aspects of semiconductors, computer architecture, microprocessor design, programming language design, and a wide variety of software engineering. A CTO in multiple start-up ventures and CEO of my own company for a number of years, I communicate difficult ideas with colleagues, clients and partners. I have faced large scale product design, media development and crisis management challenges. I have worked in these capacities for large corporations and small, including ST Microelectronics, Oracle and Microsoft.

§5 In every one of these cases there is a common problem born of one simple fact: be it serious scholarship and research, design and development, crisis management and business development, they are all executed by passing around Word documents and PDFs.

§6 What I do day-to-day is produce documents and accept documents. Fortunately, I am very happy to be at core a “writer.” And it is because I am a good writer that I excel in my profession. But being a good writer is not sufficient. Beyond the day-to-day chatter, in any highly creative environment it is the production and exchange of effective documents that determines future behavior.

§7 The bottom-line is that this practice has only partially evolved since the arrival of high technology. All that high technology has really done is speed up the rate of exchange and improved access and organization, it has not innovated the processes that deal with our ability to apprehend new ideas and develop understanding.

§8 We need to move beyond the practice of passing around Word documents and PDFs.

§9 The technology we use today emulates paper based practices that existed before high technology came along. It was a good way to start. But, honestly, pencil and paper remain a more useful tool for the development of new and difficult ideas.

§10 Whatever your professional role, look at the collection of Word documents and PDFs that you have gathered around you now and ask yourself this simple question: How does owning them modify my behavior? If the answer is “Not at all” then they have no meaning for you. They are useless.

§11 Conversely, ask how the documents that you produce change the behavior of others. If the the answer is “Not at all” then they have no meaning to them.

§12 Books, papers, works of art and any form of digital document are only of value if they modify our behavior in someway (by diminishing or affirming our commitments, for example).

§13 I started developing this technology in 2004 using relational technology and had a hard time of it. The combination of my distraction as a scholar and researcher and the labor required for pl/SQL was not productive and the primary result of that effort was a masterful relational schema in which I worked everything out but only a partial implementation that was not very useful.

§14 In just the past two years^note:1 the work of the W3 has yielded a new generation of XML technologies that are better suited to the development of my ideas, and can be implemented by me personally, incrementally and with immediately useful results. As a result I have rarely used a regular Word processor in the past couple of years.

§16 So, using these technologies, the goal of this “structured text” project I call “memeio” is to explore the development of a new kind of digital document for highly creative environments. These include the science and engineering environments I understand well, but the technologies have broad application beyond these fields.

§17 The goal of this new kind of document is to facilitate an environment of understanding where new and complex ideas occur or the development of such ideas is required. This kind of document is entirely new and moves beyond what is possible with traditional documents. They are documents that are dense with meaning; they produce modified behaviors in those that create them and those that apprehend them.

§18 I am actively developing partnerships and projects that can be helped by the evolution of our current technology and research in this area. If this is the type of thing that interests you, or you have highly technical and creative environments that may benefit from such technology, then we encourage you to contact us.

§19 Sincerely,

Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith.

Principal Investigator

Sunnyvale, California. USA.

June 29th, 2008

♦

End Notes

^note:1 Since mid 2006, thru 2007 and 2008

Concepts

meaning: My research field deals with concepts such as “meaning” and my use of it here is an exact use, unlike conventional usage. A “meaning” is exactly the behavior produced by the apprehension of a mark; where a mark is the subject of a sign (an individuated experience).

memeio: memeio, unsurprisingly, derives from meme and io referring to the input and output of new and contagious ideas.

new kind of digital document: Current communication and development of digital documents is a lot like the traditional paper counterparts. The networked digital environment is largely untapped for the new things that it may enable that assist the development and communication of new scientific and engineering ideas. This is the conceptual space of our inquiry. What new things, kinds of document, do digital environments enable for academic industrial research and development in the science and engineering community where highly original and complex ideas unfold and are expressed to mainstream users?

XML technologies: The technologies I am referring to here are the recent developments in Native XML Databases supported by XSLT 2.0, XPath, XQuery, and XQuery Update.