We Are Not The First to Contemplate A Fresh Start — But we can be the First to Succeed in making one!

Visions of using information technology to empower end users have a long continuous history. The technology is out there, but it is fractured into many disciplines and distributed across many sites in government, academia, and industry. It is the failure to account for this reality that has prevented the Dream from taking Form. Our Institute has the vision to finally bring together a critical mass of people and ideas!

But We need your help to bring together the resources so we can close the gap between the reality that is today and our collective dream of what it should become.

On first hearing of the goals of The Institute for End User Computing, one is likely to question its relation to ongoing efforts and perhaps ask whether it is really needed in light of the outstanding work of organizations like the ACM’s SIGCHI in advancing Human-Computer Interaction research. However, there is a fundamental qualitative difference in how the Institute is working towards its goals that strongly compliments these other initiatives.

Above all else, The Institute is committed to working directly on The Big Picture — to advancing the art of technology integration and transfer, so we can get our best ideas out of the lab and into the hands of end users. We want to create a real platform that can be adopted by government, academia, and industry to meet the long unfulfilled needs of End Users.

Yes, there have been tremendous strides in boosting productivity over the last few decades and yes, today’s versions of OS X, Linux, Windows and Unix are vast improvements over their predecessors, but no, we have not come even remotely close to unlocking the full potential of End Users.

Just stop and think for a moment about how much time you have personally wasted installing and removing software, performing maintenance on your PC, and trying to figure out why things never work quite the way you wish they would. Then ask yourself if you really trust your system. Do you know what your programs are really doing? Can you trust them not to crash when you need them most? Do they make you feel like an idiot when you try to navigate through a sea of features that sounded indispensable in a product review but don’t seem to mesh in practice? Does it ever feel like half of your programs duplicate the same functionality but force you to memorize inconsistent interfaces to get to it? Can you make even modest changes to how things work without having to wait for yet another upgrade from the developer that will fix what is troubling you while breaking something else?

In short, yes things are good today compared to the days of old, but they aren’t nearly as good as we tend to assume they are.

We simply can not afford to keep waiting around for Some Day, we need to make Some Day, Today, and that is why we need The Institute for End User Computing!

Today’s academics (as well as the global legions of open source software developers for that matter) routinely work marvels in building ad hoc bridges between code written by dozens of authors in multiple programming languages, layering library upon library, and often creating complex multi-tier systems using middle-ware and servers running on different platforms. Unfortunately, this level of complexity isn’t tenable in an end user setting.

Indeed, there is a tacit assumption shared by almost all researchers that works against our best intentions. You see, most of us take a reductionist view which holds that advances in research within each sub-discipline will automatically be combined and then trickle down to End Users without our direct intervention. We trust that commercial vendors will be reading all of our conference papers in each field and take the time to distill them into products that will channel a healthy stream of royalties back to our labs. We assume that if there could be better systems than the ones we are using, surely someone would have marketed them by now and that in there absence, the best we can hope for is a slow evolution of what we can buy today towards our dream systems of tomorrow.

The trouble with these research prototypes is that they aren’t serviceable by non-experts and often depend on site-specific kludges and key components that are too expensive or (even if free in the monetary sense) too hard to acquire and set up outside a well-funded lab. Even when they build on ostensibly cross-platform solutions like Java, they tend to depend on elaborate installation procedures and have internal dependencies on support libraries that might introduce any number of software conflicts.

But an even more fundamental issue is that, for the most part, such systems have least common denominator user interfaces that aren’t well integrated with their host platform, and are structured primarily to demonstrate the one or two ideas needed to support an annual conference paper. In short, they are not designed to serve as parts of broader deployable solutions for end users.

Thus while one can “in principle” create advanced solutions combining various research technologies, the results depend on integrating many systems built on radically different layered foundations (i.e. you might have chunks written in 3 or 4 languages with bits needing to run under different operating systems to achieve a given technology integration). Such composite systems are extremely brittle and virtually impossible to deploy without a lot of effort by researchers familiar with the implementation of each component. So what does make it out of the lab, winds up in a very expensive monolithic package or runs in a vendor controlled environment that the customer can't touch, since touching anything would be highly likely to break the aggregate system. Moreover, if one does deploy multiple “advanced” applications of this nature, each one winds up incorporating inconsistently duplicated functionality because the conversational gestures supported by conventional operating systems are at too low a level.

Of course we have seen some great proprietary strides forward in the commercial sector that fuel our faith — systems like Apple Dylan and OpenDoc that hint at a real paradigm shift. However, these very systems have failed in the marketplace so Researchers and Developers try to play it safe in their own work and build demos with more common place time-tested cross-platform solutions that are more likely to remain available to End Users.

Our hopes are further fueled by the growing number of research groups that make some of their code available for other researchers to build on. But the resulting composite systems are almost inevitably kludges that depend on too much arcane knowledge to be successfully deployed and maintained outside a well-staffed lab. Often we struggle with such libraries and wind up rolling our own technically inferior solutions rather than loosing months trying to figure out how to incorporate someone else’s code.

In short, we do whatever is most expedient for getting our next prototype up and running without too much thought as to how anyone could ever combine our demo with the thousands of other good demos out there and build that dream environment that we just know should be released some day.

The Institute for End User Computing is quite novel in its approach, combining elements of a number of familiar forms as we use the development of our new end user platform as an organizing device to coordinate all of our efforts.

Some aspects of this work will closely mirror the activities of standards bodies like the World Wide Web Consortium . In this regard, we will be developing an ontology that will provide a common vocabulary and language for talking about the architecture and extensions to the platform.

The actual implementation of our designs will be also draw on the organizational approach taken by the Free Software and Open Source communities, as we invite students and volunteers to re-implement existing open source applications on our new platform.

However, unlike most Open Source projects , we will have to exercise somewhat more of centralized control to insure that the platform is fully factored with an optimal architecture. Simultaneously, a lot of work will be amenable to delegation to cooperating academic groups, giving the entire enterprise something of the character of a federally funded DARPA/NSF Grand Challenge research program.

Likewise, while we won't be legally structured as a membership organization, some facets of our work will take the form of academic conferences and working groups similar to those sponsored by the various Special Interest Groups of scholarly professional societies like the ACM and IEEE.

Other work will have more pedagogic then research value and will take place under the rubric of our academic outreach initiatives. Where faculty can’t be found to make such assignments part of their formal coursework, such tasks would be directly supported and contracted out by The Institute through the use of stipends and assistantships administered by participating university units. Alternatively, some students and student teams will be brought into the project as volunteers through the use of reputational incentives like Awards and Competitions. Here the technical sports pioneered by MIT and the ongoing Robocup Soccer and Robocup Rescue leagues can serve as models.

Moreover, as we strive to bring together a critical mass of enabling technologies, we will be working to assemble a patent pool similar to what might be set up by a commercial Research and Development Consortium along the lines of SEMATEC. The key point is that individually, each institution’s patent portfolio only represents a collection of disjointed slices of potential commercial solutions whose aggregate licensing overhead further erodes their commercial value. But once we assemble a new platform with all of the key components already in place along with a mechanism to allocate royalties among the many underlying patents on which it is based, we can crack the technology transfer nut and help all of our institutional partners to realize greater total returns on their research dollars.

Finally, additional funding can come directly from the public using programmed giving and ePhilanthropy techniques pioneered by traditional public charities. In these endeavors we will need to think like a social movement to try to reach out through the media and move the masses to buy into our vision of simple, secure, supple, and sophisticated computers.

Of course, we won't be doing all of these things from the outset. We will have to go slowly at first starting out as something of a Virtual Corporation seeking out motivated graduate students looking for a career making challenge. This way we can start to build our network of unfunded student volunteers and individual faculty members who will be drawn to pedagogic possibilities of Institute related clinical exercises. Then we can start seeking out small foundation and government grants for an interdisciplinary conference and similar discrete projects. Over time, we will begin to draw general funding and support that will open the door for us to expand our activities. At some point along the way, we will probably establish a physical presence in a college town and perhaps take space in a high technology incubator or associate with an academic department. But regardless of where we hang our proverbial hat, The Institute will serve as a nexus of collaboration for individuals and organizations located everywhere.

End User Computing is a critical capability from a National Security perspective. Our ability to use IT to streamline operations and boost organizational intelligence is vital to our economic and military strength in the world at large. We need to produce a skilled versatile domestic workforce and academic research community to maintain this edge. Likewise, we need to recognize that our cocoon of advanced technology will be a primary target of our enemies who will not rest in finding new ways to exploit software defects and design oversights to compromise our systems. They will look for social inequality as well, seizing on disparities in who benefits from IT — our so called Digital Divide — to justify their attacks on our way of life in the hope of swaying those left behind by the technology revolution, both here and abroad, to support their cause.

Yourdon’s cautionary note is well taken. As a research and teaching organization, we will be in the enviable position of being able to take our time to design safety and security into our platform and its development tools from the ground up. Commercial ventures would be hard pressed to justify such tradeoffs to their investors and potential customers.

This bold drive to create and deploy a new end user computing platform has the potential to draw some of our best and brightest minds into academia, dramatically improve software reliability & security, and offer truly universal accessibility. As a result, our work can go a long way toward strengthening our nation and our allies in the challenging times ahead.

The Institute for End User Computing recognizes and stands ready to address this national security imperative!

That said, it should also be noted that in addition to improving security per se, The IEUC is also committed to both fostering a skilled domestic IT workforce and to promoting open markets by spreading the benefits of End User Computing to all corners of the globe. We do not see any inherent conflict in these objectives and will do our best to balance the interests of our nation and our many friends overseas for the betterment of all mankind.

If you think about the creation of a radical new platform from a venture capital perspective, it becomes quite clear that most of our exciting new research projects can't support a coherent business case for the investment needed to get them out of the lab. The very cleverness that makes for fast implementations and core design choices that make for solid conference papers defeat these technologies in the marketplace because they are almost inevitably too narrow in scope and too hard to integrate into meaningful solutions in the real world.

An equally vexing situation is what has been described by some as The Patent Thicket. In short, the issue centers on concern that too many over-broad patents are being issued that cover subject matter never contemplated by our founding fathers making it impossible for even the best intentioned good faith player to develop or market a new technology that isn’t potentially infringing on someone’s patent. Indeed licensing the requisite intellectual property rights to deploy a novel solution may be every bit as big a hurdle as developing it from a technological perspective!

Given these dynamics and the wake of the Dot Com crash, no one in the venture capital markets would be willing to take the risk of trying to develop a new platform in the for-profit sector.

Thus, whether we want to admit it or not, the marketplace is failing to integrate the best ideas of our research community and creating a stale environment that is failing to attracting students to the technology sector.

We want to bring back the magic of computing and make sure that all fields share its fruits. End Users are everywhere—in Biotech, in the Public Schools, in the War Against Terror, in the Developing World, in Government, and in the Small Businesses and Large Corporations that drive our economy.

Moreover, we are not simply interested in creating another technology test bed; we want to create a working platform rethought from the ground up in light of all we have learned from each discipline to change the dynamics of technology diffusion and create a more efficient market for the adoption of new technologies. This is what we mean when we describe our work as Basic Applied Research. Along the way we can develop a Conference Series to provide an outlet for research whose value wouldn't otherwise be formally recognized.

By creating a platform that supports the needs of Researchers as End Users and End Users as Researchers we can bring the magic back to computing and dramatically cut the lag time between Academic Publication and End User Adoption, boosting everyone’s productivity. By striking a blow against the sea of frustration engendered by today’s dominant platforms we can give the worlds’ youth the positive experience of the power of scientific thought that will inspire them to pursue studies that will prepare them for leading roles in the workforce of tomorrow.

Indeed, it is this critical unmet societal need coupled with the Market Failure to address it in the for profit commercial sector that necessitates our pursuit of these nobel ends as a Public Charity. With nothing less than our very future at stake, we cannot afford to leave the Big Picture to take care of itself — we really do need The Institute for End User Computing!

When we talk about establishing a new platform, concerns often arise as to how the effort will be perceived by today's dominant market players. One cannot help but ask, where Apple, Microsoft, and IBM will fit into the new landscape and whether they will see it as in their interest to support or oppose our work.

Fortunately, there is no inherent incompatibility between our goals and theirs. While some in the Open Source community view Microsoft as an adversary, we recognize that there is a role for such commercial enterprise. We do not want to drive any of today’s players out of the market; we seek instead to change the playing field to better align their interests with those of the end user. In effect we will be offering them a way to leverage off of our pre-competitive research work by coding to our meta-platform.

Bringing the discussion back to our original concern, this means that OS vendors like Microsoft and Apple could extend their current brands into our new competitive space by creating Windows and Mac-like 'flavors' of our new environment; this will empower them to extend our base environment with their proprietary enhancements which would automatically be supported by end user applications without the need to recode any software. By abstracting out each layer of the product's design in this manner, hardware vendors will likewise be able to spawn a large number of competing devices tailored to different kinds of end users mixing and matching alternate implementations of OS capabilities. This would allow hardware developers like IBM to create higher margin total product solutions customized to meet the needs of large institutional clients, while freeing Microsoft to compete on the strength of its R&D and the quality of its optimized implementations of platform services, which is as it should be.

Small developers and Open Source aficionados will find themselves on an even footing with the big players and will be able to develop customizations for end users anywhere without having to worry about supporting thousands of unstable system configurations. As support and marketing costs are subsequently driven down, their profitability and ability to spread their code will increase considerably.

The key point is that our altruistically motivated platform specification will remain independent of any for profit player or radical idealist, and as a result provide a common ground on which each group can focus on what it does best. Some might think this would be a threatening world for Microsoft, but in reality, this would be a liberating development that would clear away the cloud of Antitrust litigation, free Microsoft of the overhead of supporting legacy code, and in the long term, provide a compelling justification for its customers to move to the new platform licensing Microsoft's new code. In short, ours is a world in which Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and the large commercial players could continue to prosper and build shareholder wealth -- and do so in concert with a healthy ecology in which mid-size firms, small developers, open-source proponents, and the free software community can all advance their interests to the benefit of end users the world over.