Developing and communicating new ideas

What we are trying to achieve.

§1 I have had this project in development since mid-2004. It is born to “scratch my own itch.”

§2 This project addresses a problem I have had repeatedly in my career: the development and expression of difficult and challenging ideas.

§3 It all started because I am once again authoring a scientific book. This book is itself the vehicle for a difficult research project. It needs to convey new and difficult ideas to a range of individuals with diverse backgrounds and disciplines. And it also needs to assist me in the development of these ideas.

§4 That project deals essentially with the same subject that memeio deals with: how we apprehend the world. This may not be immediately obvious because on first glance, memeio looks very much like a publishing system. Ultimately, that is exactly what it is. But unlike other such systems it is designed to assist in the analysis and development of new ideas and to aid human understanding.

§5 This is what I do day-to-day, for which memeio is designed to assist:

• I research and develop scientific materials. I undertake the work of a scholar and researcher.
• I develop new ideas and new technologies from successful ideas. I undertake the work of a scientific entrepreneur, in academia and industry.
• I have been a part of several large engineering teams. These have focused on aspects of semiconductors, computer architecture, microprocessor design, programming language design, and a wide variety of software engineering. I, and the teams I work, with document complex designs.
• 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. And I have worked in these capacities for large corporations and small, including ST Microelectronics, Oracle and Microsoft.

§6 These are the situations provide the scenarios for which memeio is ultimately designed.

§7 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.

§8 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.

§9 The bottom-line is that this practice has only evolved partially 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 develop and apprehend new ideas and understanding.

§10 We need to move beyond the practice of passing around Word documents. We need a new kind of document.

§11 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. It is certainly the place I start.

§12 Whatever your professional role, look at the collection of Word documents and PDFs that you have virtually 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.

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

§14 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).

§15 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.

§16 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.

§18 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.

§19 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.

§20 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.

§21 Sincerely,

Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith.

Principal Investigator

Sunnyvale, California. USA.

July 25th, 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.