Developing and communicating new ideasWhat 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 yearsnote: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 |