The PI's long-standing hypothesis is that through the collective development and application of knowledge there exists an important prospect for large segments of our society to increase significantly their collective ability to understand complex, dynamic, and critical problems. In this project the PI aims to develop an early stage of a new tool he calls a HyperScope, a lightly modified web browser supported by an "Intermediary Processor" (IP) that operates between the browser and the files or databases holding the existing working knowledge of a collaborative community, and which is designed with the goal of augmenting society's learning capability by allowing people to interact with knowledge in a more dynamic, multi-faceted, and integrated means as well as on a broader scale. The HyperScope is not an editor. Rather, the HyperScope user will be able to follow links into and between "legacy" files in a manner similar to using a browser with web-based HTML files. Although there will be numerous new capabilities and features that will give a HyperScope user considerably more flexibility and working power than users limited to standard browsers and "legacy" editors, the key attribute of the tool is that people working at successive future stages of the bootstrapping process it supports (as in "to lift one's self by one's own bootstraps") can continuously apply the results of all earlier stages to increase their own capability to do their next bit, thereby steadily improving our capability to improve our capability! The PI intends to strategically cultivate application of the HyperScope within selected scientific communities. In particular, he envisages that some of the scientific communities served by NSF could become early users and "bootstrapping contributors" who then could help orient and stimulate other communities, then other government agencies, which could lead to other countries participating in "world-wide bootstrapping." Thus, this project represents the beginning of a journey, by the PI who invented the mouse and the basic workings of our present-day computer interface at a time when the personal computer was an impossible dream, whose purpose is to take human-computer interaction to the next level.
Broader Impacts: The PI sees the HyperScope as affording an enhancement to society's infrastructure for research and education, by providing people with a tool that increases their knowledge development and application capabilities. If his views prove to be correct, this work will ultimately lead to a significant increase in the "Collective IQ" of problem solving communities of every size, which will translate, for instance, into much more effective future educational systems.
