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Sadly, frassle's autosave feature has not yet debuted for the public world. Perhaps I can get it out of the lab this weekend, with some encouragement. Would anyone like to not lose posts anymore?

I'm still thinking over Doug Engelbart's speech at Accelerating Change. Like the speech, his Bootstrap Institute website describes the greatest challenges the world now faces:

• Our world is a complex place with urgent problems of a global scale.
• 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.

If that didn't make sense to you, let me try to interpret. Engelbart is considering how innovation happens in response to large-scale problems. For some problems, a talented individual can figure out a solution—great. But other problems, those of a global scale, are too large for inventors to solve. Moving from the individual scale to the organizational or even national scale, there are still problems that are beyond the reach of these larger and larger institutions that might perhaps be solvable if additional entities could contribute.

The process for solving problems that cannot be solved by invention is evolution. In biology, the problem might be stated as "what form of life survives best?" But evolution happens in other environments too. In product markets, companies design products and compete with each other, some lasting and some failing. But the evolution metaphor doesn't end there. Evolution makes progress by chance—random mutations. A strand of DNA doesn't know whether a mutation is good or bad—it doesn't even have an opinion. But without even understanding the larger questions, its mutation contributes to the solution of an incredibly complex problem. Similarly, product developers don't always know how their product will be used, but leaving it out there for experiemental, even random combination with other objects and ideas permits it to participate in the evolution.

Furthermore, the mutations need not be random. The power still lies in the gradual overall progress despite potential individual failures. But with some cleverness, the individual "mutations" can do much better than random; if our attempts are vaguely in the right direction, they can accelerate useful evolution. On the other hand, if the agents of knowledge mutation—inventors—are overly constrained in their choices, they may actually do worse than random.

Solving problems in this fashion is what I think Engelbart means by the third bullet point above. He then sets out criteria for building and improving that mechanism:

• 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.

I don't feel I understand these points as well as the first batch. But I think when Engelbart writes "collective IQ", he is actually talking about a collective capacity for the execution of the evolutionary mechanisms. This is in part about building lots of clever inventors, but that part is severely overshadowed by the need to rapidly conceive and test lots and lots of mutations. But what about this bootstrapping business?

Well, perhaps this means that each solution reached by an evolutionary system produces not just an answer but also a new state of the evolutionary system itself. This indicates a different conception of problems and solutions: whereas an inventor might eliminate a problem by some clever invention, an evolutionary process connects the solution not only to previous solutions but to future problems and solutions. Therefore the process sets the course for its own increased productivity.

Are we witnessing the opening of a new frontier for evolution?

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According to this Earth Day Network quiz, if everyone lived like me we would need 4.2 Earths. Apparently I'm even below average for America. I've heard similar assertions from my friends, usually wealthy, well-educated Americans, that we are living beyond the resources available to us on Earth.

It's a shocking statistic, but so what? Wouldn't you expect the wealthiest, most prosperous fraction of the Earth's population to consume more than their fair share of the resources? As long as the whole population of Earth isn't living like I am, it's not a problem, is it?

Of course, there is still plenty to object to in a world where the wealthy have so much and the poor have no peace, no food, no clean water, and no medical care. As living standards improve for the world's poor, we'll have to take care not to place too heavy a burden on our Earth. I'd be really worried if I didn't think the incentives to keep growth in check weren't there—but they are. For example, it's going to be extremely rewarding to develop more energy-efficient vehicles if when gasoline becomes 50 times more expensive.

But really, I'm more curious about a different issue. Why do so many people believe that by not eating meat, and buying organic citrus fruits at Whole Foods for twice the price of conventional fruits at Stop-n-Shop, that they are making a meaningful difference to the planet? Isn't the extra $0.30 per orange just going to fund some executive's yacht, or a longer commute for your cashier? Isn't a lot of the environmentalist rhetoric just a way of buying the false hope that you can make a difference in a world we're eager to make sense of, but truly can't understand?

Entrepreneur, philanthropist, and ex-cosmonaut Mark Shuttleworth has an article about his experience funding the development of SchoolTool, an open source school administration system. Mark first attempted to develop this software by funding a dedicated team, which failed as the developers pursued shiny geeky projects instead of producing working software. To counteract this problem, he will fund multiple, separate teams that collaborate over the internet. This will have two major effects on the project. First, the different teams will keep each other in check—focused on developing working parts of the software because other developers depend on them. Second, the separate teams will be forced to have their discussions on public forums like mailing lists and wikis. This will open up the development process to input and criticism from other developers and customers, as well as build a body of explicit knowledge that will help the community sustain itself without overdependence on the original team.

This seems like a good strategy and I hope that it continues to serve SchoolTool well. But I want to propose another approach: funding the surrogate customer. Open source projects can really take off only when there is a balance of management-style leaders, hardworking programmers, and conscientious end-users. It is the nature of open source that any individual need not fall neatly into one of these boxes, and one may indeed be all three—a person truly scratching his own itch. Mark's approach seems to start with getting some good programmers and building extra support for the leadership. But can we also go the other direction, funding the creation of users?

I think here the philanthropists can take a lesson from commercial software development. Most software development companies have dedicated Quality Assurance (QA) teams, whose job is to test the software being delivered by the development team and find bugs. Really, the purpose of QA is to serve as a surrogate customer—to keep developers in check by complaining the way a customer would, but before you've actually sold anything. Because QA staff are employed, they are also distinguished from regular customers by their willingness to work patiently with developers to sort out problems; they have a stake in the software's success.

This same relationship happens with the best users of open source software. When a user really wants a project to succeed because it will make her own life easier, and she knows she can contribute fruitfully to the project, she will be more patient and generous. If in her use of the software she finds a bug, she may not only report it, but report it in detail. She'll add an explanation of her motivations for using the software in this way, descriptions of workarounds that she's found, and an explanation of the ultimately desired behavior. Software developers can often fix a bug without much of this background information, but a thorough bug report is distinguished from a trivial one by its ability to trigger Aha! moments in the developers' minds. The most valuable bug reports both elucidate real project requirements, giving developers a more accurate direction, and pin that direction to an actual living person that the developer can truly help. They help developers stay effective.

This leads to an interesting question: if we had bags of money, could we ensure this benefit to an open source project by simple paying people? If we buy these surrogate customers for open source projects, how much faster can a project get rolling? How much better will their software be? In other words, is it worth it? Perhaps another philanthropic ex-cosmonaut will help us find out.

The functionality and power in frassle is growing a lot right now, with the creation of the site builder and usability improvements in the aggregator. The site builder will keep me occupied for a while, but when it's done it will demand a new kind of feature: support for collaboration.

Collaboration is an interesting issue in frassle. On one hand, a fundamental assumption in frassle is that categories are personal and we need ways to gradually learn correlations between different organizational systems. On the other hand, there are some times when you want to work within an explicitly agreed-upon category hierarchy. This usually happens when you're working in a close-knit group with clear goals.

Right now I'm involved in starting this kind of group. It looks like our first project will be developing a comparison of aggregators. I think it would be useful to use frassle to build this comparison: a note would represent one aggregator, and we'd categorize that note according to what features that aggregator had. For example, we'd create a note for SharpReader and put in under /platform/Windows, /display style/3-pane, and /features/tracks which items you've read.

The category system here is something we want to all share. It probably won't be feasible for a single person to review every aggregator, but we have to stick to the same criteria.

Today frassle binds one user to one feed. So I may well have to start this project by creating a fake user account, giving the password to my colleagues, and (as far as frassle is concerned) all acting like one person.

This is kind of like stepping into a corporate role; you log out of the frassle user that normally catches all your writing—the personal role—and enter an entity that looks like a user but is actually the collective effort of whoever has the password. This is an appealing metaphor and I wonder if all frassle needs is a way to do this without the graceless kludge of sharing a password.

Other possibilities:

• Shared categories. All users have access to a certain set of categories. They can each add things into one of these categories, as well as add, remove, move, or rename the categories themselves.
• Subscribing to categories. All users subscribe to one user's category tree. When that user changes her tree, the changes are offered to each subscriber, who must accept them into their own tree. This is an interesting possibility, and could perhaps be a layer on top of shared categories. Also, it is not just one-way; if Alice and Bob wanted to fully share control of a tree, they would both subscribe to each other. The change approval system would be a good way to ensure that changes are made obvious to everyone involved.

Still, all of these approaches are pretty abstract. How do you think it should work?

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… there is the misconception that new ideas come simply from detail[ed] knowledge of your field. In fact, most creativity comes from around the boundaries of a discipline where fields of expertise overlap, it comes from the edges of the known not the comfortable centre. These days that overlap seems to be achieved mainly by the coming together of specialists at those boundaries – a sort of collective polymathy. But however you do it, innovation requires polymathy.

Over the past century, humankind has seen dramatic increases in specialization—at home, at work, in geography, in scholarship, in the layout of cities and towns. There is, of course, a compelling cause—knowledge in so many realms has been so much expanded that effectively applying knowledge to healthcare, law, or scientific experimentation requires extensive training. In these fields, there may be a cost in lost progress or innovation because of excessive division of understanding.

But there is also a much scarier trend. Not everyone needs to make scientific discoveries, but everyone needs to have a healthy life that includes caring for friends and family, pursuing satisfying work, making love, eating, learning, and teaching. Increasingly we have psychiatrists to care for us, consumerism as the surrogate objective of work we do not otherwise value, sexual desires shaped by mass media, food made by machines, and a school/college monopoly on learning.

Any of these effects is probably an impediment to happiness on its own. But what about the second-order effects? If, from a young age, you never believe you have a chance to become a most trusted friend, or an effective teacher, how will you approach other problems? Will you just assume you can't achieve goal because you're not a goal-ist?

This is the danger expressed in Brave New World and similar dystopic visions—that humans will tend further toward believing they can do nothing. Is that prophecy fulfilling itself right now?