This portion of the site is in a constant state of dramatic revision. (4/1/00) This link will take you to a recent report I prepared to determine what tasks would give me the best possible preparation to be a project manager. I am currently using the following tools to guide the development of my life plan:

Criterium Decision Plus
Microsoft Project 98
Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

Perhaps the best clue as to my plans lie in what I'm thinking about. Recent ruminations have been focused on trying to figure out how to unlock the potential of a hyperlinked medium. Excerpts from a recent email follow. Credit for the source of these ideas is given to Professor Thompson at UCLA and www.forethought.org.

Media affect the evolution of knowledge in society. A suitable hypertext publishing medium can speed the evolution of knowledge by aiding the expression, transmission, and evaluation of ideas. If one aims, not to compete with the popular press, but to supplement journals and conferences, one may have a better means by which to enhance the world. This act might also be construed as a service by journals and end-users. The direct benefits of using a hypertext publishing medium should bring emergent benefits, helping to form intellectual communities, to build consensus, and to extend the range and efficiency of intellectual effort. These benefits seem numerous, deep, and substantial, but are hard to quantify. Nonetheless, rough estimates of benefits suggest that development of a better hypertext publishing medium should be regarded as a goal of first-rank importance, which may also be turned, through some addition of saavy, into a business.

When I had been younger, I believed that all problems had simple solutions, but that the means to those solutions were the source of the problem. With this problem, I believe that even coming up with a solution may take some effort. This effort, though, closely mirrors some of the thoughts that you had regarding intra-company communication. It may be that we are able to develop a product that complements company intranets with the ability for workers to create extrinsic links, allowing for all documents to be 'live,' and evolving, while also sparing a casual reader from a revision history or overly complex documents drawing multiple and perhaps contradictory conclusions.

There are questions about how 'open' a company or proposal should be. There is certainly a debate between Jack Stack's 'open company' where every employee can read the ledgers and the more popular corporate realities. It may be that the SEC itself requires a degree of internal secrecy, which may pose interesting problems that could become sustainable competitve advantages over time. Instead, it might be that our business is as consultants and researchers seeking to answer this question.

I think, also, it might be interesting to try to form an index of memes. (Memes are to thoughts what individual sounds are to words - there are, perhaps, as many as there are possible states of the brain.) As I'd talked to you before about my interest in researching 'meta-companies', and coming up with the ability to create optimal business plans, I'm interested in doing something similar for thought, so that the corollaries of any thought are immediately found. Mostly, though, I want for there to be a way for people with small or part-formed ideas to add to the intellectual community. I believe too many good ideas die for want of an accompanying novel.

I'm also somewhat dissatisfied by what does become novels. An author's (bad) idea leads to a write-up, then to submission, review, rewriting, resubmission, publication, and distribution: only then (after months' delay) does it become public. This then leads to reading by a critic, an idea for a refutation, write-up, submission, publication, and distribution: only then (after further months) has the idea received public criticism. This cycle can easily take a year or more, though the total thinking-time required may be only a matter of days. And even then the original publication exists in a thousand libraries, unchanged and unmarked, waiting to mislead future readers. We've already seen the Internet bring peer reviews of the quality of books - perhaps we could extend this evaluation to smaller pieces of thought, allowing for the immediate 'counter-meme' to be voiced.

Perhaps what I'm suggesting is developing the technology to support communities of thinkers - a better noteboard. I believe that this idea could be near the next Critical App. for the net, perhaps somewhere near as useful as the printing press.

In the offline world, different brands of scholorship have had to do a great deal of branding to get their ideas recognized; professors at my University who were 'out of vogue' couldn't get their ideas read, while other authors were revered. This system proves useful in filtering what people read, but there is certainly a better way to communicate it in a dynamic medium. Perhaps your computer can remember which contributors that you like, beginning you with the views of an intellectual community that you place yourself a part of. Perhaps all ideas are evaluated by readers at a mouse-click, and their values are generalized. In companies, perhaps titles and their relation to you are more meaningful. Perhaps you could pass along the evaluate 'button' in emails containing you ideas, letting your friends elevate your ideas if you are not already respected in the discussion or environment by readers. I'm not quite sure of this, but I suspect that replicating this mechanism could also be a business. Perhaps, instead, it might be our goal to create an open publishing forum in which people are able to charge royalties for access to their ideas.

Presumably we could build competitive advantages in the form of content, ratings and classifications of content, and patenting of ideas implemented. I would imagine that we'd only charge royalties for the site when authors charge also for their ideas so that our technology is not inferior.