Program for the Future: Dec 8 AND 9

We’re all watching the election returns tonight, history in the making.  Thanks for voting!

Program for the Future

The October 27 post, Engelbart Legacy Foundation: Augmenting Collective IQ, was an invitation to SRI’s 40th Anniversary of the Mother of All Demos at Stanford on Dec. 9.  That invitation isn’t complete without including the Tech Museum interactive conference being held Dec. 8.  Together they are part of the Program for the Future, the larger and ongoing effort to accelerate the augmentation of Collective Intelligence represented by Engelbart’s work, created by NextNow members including Bill Daul, Dave Davison, Eileen Clegg, Doug Engelbart, Mei Lin Fung, Valerie Landau and Robert Stephenson and supported by NextNow Collaboratory.  This invitation just went out to the network, but is being included here for broader distribution.

Program for the Future is dedicated to Douglas Engelbart’s quest to harness technology for human betterment. Sponsored by The Tech Museum of Innovation, the MIT Museum, The New Media Consortium, and SDForum, this two-day conference is a dialog with people developing new tools, interfaces, research and methods to augment collective intelligence. It will be held December 8 and 9 in San José and Stanford, California.

Speakers on December 8 include Professor Thomas Malone, author of The Future of Work and Director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google. The New Media Consortium, an example of Engelbart’s prescient concept of a networked improvement community, will be highlighed.  Professor Andries van Dam of Brown University who hosted the 50th anniversary of Vannevar Bush’s groundbreaking article “As We May Think.” will be the highlight of the December 8th Evening program. Program chairs are Professor Hiroshi Ishii, Associate Director of the MIT Media Lab, and Joel Orr, Founder of the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software.

December 9th’s morning program is a Call to Action to organize ourselves to move forward to harness the collective intelligence of our community. The afternoon program shifts to the Stanford Memorial Hall joining with the SRI commemoration of the team that created the demo.

On this, the 40th anniversary of Engelbart’s legendary “mother of all demos,” the Program for the Future will launch a global competition for new tools that improve collective Intelligence. In keeping with Engelbart’s vision of mass collaboration, this event also brings together many communities — education, business, nonprofit, social, political and technology. Together we will brainstorm ways to enhance our capability for problem-solving, decision-making, knowledge organization, and planning in every field of human endeavor.

Please see the Program for the Future website for schedule and registration details.