Re: [ba-unrev-talk] AmTech?
At 01:40 PM 4/21/2002 -0700, you wrote: (01)
>I googled for AmTech (both site:bootstrap.org and -site:bootstrap.org) and
>didn't come up with much information except that "AmTech is a non-profit
>whose business is to facilitate the formation and ongoing business
>operations of formal collaborative alliances, largely for NASA."
><http://www.bootstrap.org/ba-org.htm#2A>http://www.bootstrap.org/ba-org.htm#2A
>
>Just wondering if I missed something important, or if anybody knows
>anything else about this. (02)
What more do you feel you need to know? What might you have missed? Visit
the amtech site http://www.amtech-usa.org/index1.html, skip the flash intro
unless you want to see it, then take a look at the many interesting
projects in which they are involved, not the least of which is the BA. (03)
Bootstrap Alliance has a core planning committee, some members of which
are, as I write this, in Singapore, where Douglas Engelbart is the featured
speaker at a World Library Conference. Amtech, through its CEO Karen Risa
Robbins, provides legal and financial guidance to the planning committee,
and contributes an enormous amount of useful ideas as well. I know this
because I am a member of that committee. (04)
Bootstrap Alliance, in my own personal opinion, is at a place in history
where Doug's ideas have the opportunity, perhaps now more than ever, to
reach the social mindset needed to carry out the vision contained in those
ideas. Already, we are seeing numerous products find their way onto the
market that satisfy some aspect of the vision. For instance, the
Multivalent Browser (open source, Java) at UC Berkeley
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~phelps/Multivalent/ is designed around a
central Document object that, for all the world, is the kind of
intermediate representation Doug has been calling for as a means of
enabling browsing of legacy documents. The product Pepper, from r-objects
http://www.r-objects.com/, while not a completely open source product,
clearly makes great headway in the direction of providing the kinds of
tools called for in an OHS. Also, believe it or now, the Oracle 8i
database system (not open source at all, but quite easy to get access to)
has the ability to take documents in any format, archive them, and return
them in a format appropriate to whatever application is calling. Clearly
another implementation of some mechanism that leads to the ability to work
within a heterogeneous resource environment. And there are numerous open
source projects, like TouchGraph, Nexist, Lucid Fried Eggs, and many
others, each of which may offer some contribution to an eventual
realization of an OHS. (05)
The committee, on which amtech serves, is in the process of defining the
future of the BA, its membership processes, its funding opportunities, and
more. Hope that helps. (06)
Cheers
Jack (07)