A recipient of the Turing Award, the National Medal of Technology and a couple of dozen other highest honors, Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013) was recognized with some of the highest honors an inventor could receive. As the inventor of computer mouse and progenitor of “word processing”, outline processing, windows, teleconferencing, Internet, bitmapped screens, hypertext, hypermedia, groupware, “wikiness”, email... he saw into the future and realized the way computers could be created and used.

Yet, even though Alan Kay famously asked “What will the Silicon Valley do when they run out of Doug’s ideas?”, Doug felt as if the world had missed the point. When asked by Sam Hahn in 2010 what percentage of his vision had been realized in practice, Doug answered: “3.6%”.

What might the remaining “96.4%” consist of? Perhaps the following quotation, from the book the “Engelbart Hypothesis”, might provide a clue:

“Many years ago, I dreamed that people were talking seriously about the potential of harnessing a technological and social nervous system to improve the IQ of our various organizations. What if, suddenly, in an evolutionary sense, we evolved a super new nervous system to upgrade our collective social organisms? Then I dreamed that we got strategic and began to form cooperative alliances of organizations, employing advanced networked computer tools and methods to develop and apply new collective knowledge.”

The Program For the Future events in Palo Alto in December 2013 and Oslo in 2014 – and the community building before, between and beyond the events – will explore the questions:

What is remaining “96.4%”? And, how might humanity bring it to life?