View a sampling of V.I. work online.

At the beginning of a meeting there might be a long horizontal paper unrolled across the wall. Eileen would, from start of meeting, begin sketchhng out words, clouds, little people, relationships, all the way thru the end of the meeting. These murals served as conceptual records of the meetings — embedding not only ideas, but interrelationships. Particularly relevant to NextNow was her Engelbart mural, viewable on VisualInsight.net

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This is what I’d call a state of inquiry, in which one discards any pretense of sophistication and critism, and simply observes — takes in all aspects of what is happening, and reserves judgment and critique.

It’s actually akin to the state of mind that works best when you’re first viewing a film. You observe a lot, but initially there’s limited information, so an approach in which you let it all flow in and hold your judgments ’til later can be the best strategy.

I think Bill’s approach is often similar. At least at the beginning, before sparking a conversation, he often puts people together with no detailed plan for outcomes, and basically makes or “holds the space” for something to happen. He makes the introduction — and lets it go from there. You can be sure he doesn’t do it randomly — there’s always some hint — but it leaves plenty of space for exploration.

Wish I could give you concrete examples. In my case there some fuzzy cases. My professional life has been in Computer Science. But it has been often at the fuzzy edge of what used to be called “man-machine” interfaces or communication. It meant working in 3D visualization, data visualisation, “art” to some degree, and ultimately with Digital Audio Workstations and the composition of music. Along the way various NextNow events included people with interesting ideas and projects that influenced my work — and for sure influenced it visually.

PS: For the 2015 events, I just now found the third page link, so March,  April and May are now all accounted for.

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Tonight I sit and share with you my thoughts about our friend who we sometimes call “Mr Human Glue” who has played a creative and interesting role in our lives. At least in mine.

How I Came to It

Way back in the 1970s I created a technology project at Northwestern University where we sought to introduce and experiment with online communication and education. As a young professor I was into the tech and because we were so far “ahead of the curve” part of my role was to discover and meet other experimenters in related work. At some point a fellow called me up (or wrote on paper!) to say that he had a grant to “call people up and introduce them.” I believe it was an NSF grant. My friend who team-taught a seminar with me — Bob Johansen — and I had some number of such calls, introduced and moderated by this facilitator, and relationships were sparked that went on for decades.

I say that by way of introducing here the concept of “professional introducer.”

Not an entirely new concept, of course, because we know that centuries ago artists had studios where they worked together and often novel ideas arose, musicians and intellectuals had salons, and the univeersity concept certainly served to cross-polinate (ccompared to guilds and trades).

Bob and I had done a collaboration at Northwestern — teaming up to create a Seminar on College Teaching (so-named by our Dean Claude Mathis) in which we intentionally brought together graduate students and faculty from many departments, using this mix to spark new ways of viewing and supporting and conducting education (and expanding our use of “distance learning” technologies). (I’ve writen some about this Computers And Teaching project.)

NextNow

So it must have been 2003 — Bill Daul came along (but no recollection of how we met) with his idea to formally bring people together, which he named NextNow, and it was familiar and very natural. I “signed up” immediately. I don’t recall whether NextNow had coalesced around Doug Engelbart already, or not, but early NextNow meetings such as the one at Fort Mason (using World Cafe as its structure – this may have been only the second NextNow meeting) included a wonderfully broad participation from all over the San Francisco Bay Area. I can’t overestimate how many people I met thru those events – they were miraculous. (Also see Engelbart on Wikipedia)

NextNow meetings were held at many venues, though Doug’s house may hold the record, and events held at or with the collaboration of MediaX at Stanford I think were some of the most fruitful.

For a long period – perhaps most of the life of NextNow – operations, events and meetings at The NextNow Collaboratory in Berkley played an underlying structural role and provided more of an ongoing physical presence than the more “itinerant” meetings.

When I decided on a career redirect in 2015 I celebrated by putting together a paroxism of several NextNow meetings in downtown San Francisco (in March then April and May) we used a model we’d been improving over the years – presentations; small groups; re-convene and synthesize. One of many models the group had tried.

In conclusion (of this one note) I want to recognize publicly that Bill’s work as founder and listener-in-chief allowed me, and certainly a number of others, to meet new people and new-yet-connectable ideas, over a period of maybe a couple of decades, that otherwise just might not have happened. And there was often a special synergy when people “collided” from disparate disciplines.

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There’s a T.I. Speak-&-Spell device from 1980. And among the buried treasure — actual physical copies of many of our DesignWare products for personal computers in the 1980s. I also found a box of goodies from a company I helped form that went bust in 1997. And another box of desk goodies from Knowledge Universe Interactive Studio, 1999. And two boxes of Leapfrog toys from year 2000. Most of these still function.

But also, in cleaning that space today, I found this on the floor. From historical documents it appears to be vintage 1980-1985. I remember the old punched-out tokens, but this one doesn’t have the “Y” punchout. I don’t know it’s provenance, although I was in New York many times in the early 1980s, working with publishers and media companies. So it may have been in my pocket upon return to San Francisco from one of those trips. But, of course, it never made it into a final turnstyle, and never will again, as the MetroCard entirely took over as the currency for transit fares in 2003.

I’ll add this token to my storehouse of RFID cards (which includes a paper MetroCard from 2018).

And this token is still “GOOD FOR ONE FARE” on the memory train!

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