FAQ's 9/5/10 — 4:37 EDT

This page addresses common questions about The Institute.

In a nutshell, we are a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation that engaged in research and educational initiatives to bring the full potential of computer technology to ordinary people in all walks of life.

We have been organized as a nonprofit under New York State law and have been recognized by The IRS as a public charity at end of our advance ruling period.

We have registered in a number of state to actively solicit funds and any donations sent to us are tax deductible to the extent provided by Law.

If you are a student or research, we want to hear from you.

Likewise, if you are an established figure interested in joining our Volunteer Advisory Board, your participation would be most welcome.

Ultimately, we want to develop a Legacy Free End User Computing Platform from the ground up. Nothing short of such a fresh start will be able to remedy the many bugs and systemic security vulnerabilities that plague today's systems.

What is the IEUC?

Thank you ever so much for taking the time to read about our launch of The Institute for End User Computing. It is our most sincere hope that you will consider the possibility of aligning your work with ours and helping us to make this bold new venture a success.

When you are confronted daily with computer systems that would try the patience of a saint, you know that you aren't stupid, that there has to be a better way, and that there has to be a way to find and implement that better way.

You remember when we used to think that computers would save time and reduce stress, that commercial software should be elegant and bug free, and that ordinary end users, even children, would soon be able to write their own software and easily tweak commercial products to behave the way they want them to without having to enlist the help of a professional support staff. You also know that somewhere along the way those early ideals fell by the wayside. Perhaps it was a function of premature standardization, monopolistic impacts of network effects, or simple quirks of human psychology, but somehow the entire computing industry seems to have fallen into a series of systemic traps where prudent short term decisions at the individual and firm level have sown the seeds for long term paralysis and mediocrity in the industry overall.

So, despite the ubiquitous presence of PC's in our homes and businesses, the many fold increase in raw computational power, the near universal accessibility of untold quantities of raw data through the Internet, and the remarkable success of the Open Source movement in meeting the needs of hardcore computer geeks, the sad truth is that ordinary computer users feel more impotent than ever. Even worse, we are facing a market failure and technology transfer crisis in the high tech sector, for all too many researchers have grown complacent and given up on any hope of seeing the fruits of their labors lead to truly dramatic innovations.

In short, most everyone assumes that today's Windows, Unix, Linux, and Mac systems represent the end of history for desktop computing and that while machines will grow smaller and faster and tap into wireless networks, there won't be any real qualitative changes in how businesses and consumers use computers.

But you know that the costs of this status quo are too high. Today's system designs contribute to a widening digital divide that weighs down the poor and disabled. They drain 59 and a half billion dollars annually from our GDP. They drive us mad with their bugs and instability while leaving us vulnerable to hackers and cyber-terrorists. They impose untenable barriers to market entry discouraging entrepreneurship. And they leave the job market so fragmented that workers can’t maintain adequate qualifications to remain competitive over time, while firms themselves are consequently unable to fill their technical staffs with domestic labor.

The Institute for End User Computing is incorporated as a New York State nonprofit corporation to promote research and teaching centered on the development of a new state-of-the-art End User Computing Platform.

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What is End User Computing?

When we speak of End User Computing, we are referring to the total experience of using information technology to both augment and develop one’s own innate skills and abilities. Therefore, we are not simply interested in the user interface per se, but also the underlying capabilities provided by a user’s computing environment and how they can be orchestrated and made comprehensible. End User Computing embraces a broad range of technologies and techniques and looks at how they can be integrated and refactored to enhance system stability, security, and flexibility.

End User Computing is about empowering people to derive the greatest benefit from their computer with the least stress. There is no one stereotypical End User, but rather a number of representative user types whose technical skills span a continuum from novice to expert, whose ages, languages, and physical abilities are not uniform, and whose areas of substantive interest vary markedly. But by discovering the commonalities that underlie this rich diversity, End User Computing offers the promise of leveraging work aimed at supporting specific classes of users to the benefit of all. Thus efforts to improve accessibility for the disabled, might for example, lead to novel interaction styles that empower mobile business users and peace officers to do more with ultra-miniature devices.

In short, we focus on the big picture and dwell in the interstices between research domains. We work to knit together communities and create vibrant new ecologies in which technology and technology users can flourish. We do not subscribe to the view that End Users are Dummies who cannot, should not, and do not want to understand their tools. Nor do we ignore the reality that technologists are themselves End Users.

Indeed, we have come to recognize that for decades we have been lowering our expectations as End Users at the very same time that we have been pushing the boundaries of the enabling technologies coming out of our labs and R&D centers. Ironically, our very efforts to maximize the impact of our short term research efforts by reusing old code and providing backward compatibility with ancient systems to minimize the learning curve for those trained on them have, in aggregate, had the perverse effect of holding us back.

We recognize that economic and research policy dynamics have been a factor in these feedback loops, which have stifled deep innovation at the platform level. This has lead to an IT training crisis, the spread of maddeningly frustrating buggy software, and the progressive de-personalization of the personal computer. Yet at the very same time we are seeing a renaissance in tools, languages, and libraries for programmers. The trouble is that these facilities are fragmented and do not transition well from the lab into the real world and seldom make an appreciable positive impact at the End User level.

This is why we believe that for the US and indeed the world to realize the full potential of IT and for people to be able to control the role it plays in their lives, we need to break with the past and rethink our computing environments from the ground up. This is not to say that we should throw out everything we have learned over the last thirty years, but rather that NOW is the time to finally put ALL of our knowledge to use in a principled fashion.

This is why we are forming The Institute for End User Computing.

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What is a 501(c)(3)?

A 501(c)(3) is a classification under the United States Internal Revenue Code that recognizes an organization as a nonprofit tax exempt entity. Such a classification means that an organization can solicit tax deductible contributions from the public and that its income is not subject to taxation (unless such income is derived from a business activity unrelated to its charitable purpose).

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Why Are We Organized as a 501(c)(3)?

Only through the development of a new computing platform can we hope to achieve the goals of empowering end users, promoting universal accessibility, increasing system security & stability, improving the efficacy of our technology transfer initiatives, and preparing our students for the future. With these objectives firmly in mind, our first question was how best to organize ourselves to put our ideas into practice - in concrete terms, we needed to choose an organizational form and business model for our operations.

The obvious choice of a traditional for-profit corporate structure would have offered the advantages of limited liability for participants and the potential of directly turning a profit and thus accessing venture capital markets. However, the absence of any effective ventures pursuing our aims in today’s market, taken together with the then relatively low market share of Apple and the past failures of Be and Amiga (two alternate operating systems that came closest to breaking with the Windows/Unix status quo), made it rather clear that this approach would have been extremely hard to sell to potential investors. Indeed, anecdotal evidence and various trade press reports had suggested that in the wake of the Dot Com collapse, Venture Capital markets had been sharply contracting. Moreover, were we to depend on private sector funding, the attendant imperative of maximizing return on investment (ROI) would have driven us to make the very compromises which in aggregate have lead to the disappointing quality of today’s computing environments. Thus our new platform wouldn't become attractive enough for commercial players to take up its banner until some point in the distant future when its development is nearly complete.

There is a second quasi-commercial form that we could have adopted. If we had taken our product to be “pre-competitive research” itself, we could have endeavored to form a for-profit R&D Consortium like MCC which would have been owned by share-holding corporations & universities who would have provided funding in return for exclusive or advanced access to our technologies or royalties flowing from their use. This would however have come at the cost of putting control of the Board in their hands which would likely lead to a dilution of our primary altruistic purposes while making it less likely that a unified platform would have emerged as a project deliverable. Moreover, under this model it might have been somewhat harder for us to align our efforts with the free software and open source communities.

Ultimately, we wanted to change the landscape of computing for the public good while creating a new market into which private enterprises could expand. Thus, we intend to remain neutral in political debates over whether all software should be free of monetary cost, or whether all source code needs to be open for inspection while trying to create an environment that can nurture those subscribing to each of those ideals. Nevertheless, we also want an environment and architecture in which each end user has the power and freedom to combine and swap in and out competing free, open, and proprietary solutions. Since our one driving interest is in maximizing the public good, it is only logical that this approach should be able to attract support from individual, governmental, corporate, and philanthropic parties.

This last observation proved most illuminating, as we realized that only a not-for-profit entity could provide a vehicle eligible to seek out all of these forms of support. This is to say that 501(c)(3) tax exempt organizations enjoy a preferential treatment that permits them to solicit foundation grants and tax-deductible donations while also exempting them from many taxes which might otherwise drain capital needed for their operations. Accordingly, some traditional R&D Consortia adopt this organizational form.

Nevertheless, The Institute will differ from such conventional consortia in that we will work to address the big picture of how to integrate research across a much broader range of technologies cutting across both hardware and software for the applied objective of proactively transferring technology into the domain of End Users. Conventional consortia tend to have a much narrower focus. Moreover, we want to build bridges to the Free Software and Open Source communities to give them the opportunity to participate in shaping and implementing the new platform along with the many University Faculty, Graduates, and Undergraduates we hope to attract to our cause.

In short, because we set out on this quest to improve End User Computing technology for the public good with no interest in pursuing a corporate profit or desire to become a creature of short run commercial interest, we organized The Institute as an independent 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation.

It is, moreover, our hope that the ISV and VC communities will embrace our work, since we don't have an anti-corporate or anti-VC agenda and envision a technological infrastructure that will facilitate technology transfer from lab to market and empower both commercial and non-commercial ventures of all scales to deploy their technologies on our the new platform competing primarily on technical merit and value delivered to End Users.

But to make this strategy work, we need your support!

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Where Are We?

Initially, The Institute, whose directors, advisors, and associates collaborate from all corners of The Net, will be administered from a site in New York State's Westchester County overlooking the historic Hudson River. Westchester is home to IBM and its Watson Research Center as well as many other corporate headquarters. It offers a unique mix of urban amenities and bucolic vistas that inspired the famous Hudson River School of

artists and many local craftsmen. Our location lies less than an hour to the North of New York City on the Metro-North Railroad, giving us convenient access to the many grantmaking foundations located in Midtown Manhattan.

In time, we may wish to establish a residential program like that of The Santa Fe Institute here in Westchester or we may some day opt to relocate to a college town; but doing so would be purely a matter of convenience. As a formally incorporated nonprofit entity, we will be able to pursue our own funding without having to depend on finding a school to sponsor us. Moreover, should we opt to lease incubator space at, or otherwise affiliate with, any particular university, we will continue to work closely with research groups at many other institutions.

As we see in the example of the World Wide Web Consortium sited at MIT, such an arrangement can confer considerable benefits. Indeed, our host institution would gain invaluable publicity from our high profile activities. It could also become our prime beta site and take a leading role in the coalition of institutions pooling their technologies to make the new platform a reality. This would also translate to research and employment opportunities for its students and help it to attract top talent from other schools. Finally, working with The Institute would open the door for joint grantwriting opportunities that could bring additional resources to its campus.

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What is Our Philosophy?

The Institute for End User Computing is a not-for-profit New York State corporation dedicated to advancing the state of the art of information technology (IT) for the purpose of empowering End Users. Regardless of your level of technological expertise or your field of endeavor, when you sit down in front of a computer or information appliance designed by someone else, you are taking on the role of the End User.

This experience can be one of fulfillment or frustration depending on the architecture and philosophy behind the system in front of you. Make no mistake, software and hardware designers predicate most of their decisions on a mental model of how you will eventually be using their products. They can see your role as that of a partner and potential co-developer of your own personalized computing environment, as a skilled domain specialist looking for standard out-of-the-box functionality, or as little more than a passive viewer of pay-per-view media.

Regardless of your needs and background, with today's systems, the odds are that you often find yourself saying "There has got to be a better way!". With your support, we at The Institute for End User Computing can develop that way!

In other words, we want you to have more choices in the marketplace. Ones that won't have you tearing your hair out in frustration, ones that will adapt to your needs, and ones that won't exploit your decision today to preclude you from changing your mind tomorrow. Thus we are working to counter both the technological and the sociological factors that have prevented the free market from delivering on the promise of the personal computing revolution. We are here to educate and empower you and to help industry, academia, and government to develop IT solutions in the best interests of society.

These ideals motivate The End User Computing Philosophy!

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How Are We Governed?

The Institute for End User Computing, Inc. is governed by a six member self-perpetuating Board of Directors representing a broad array of public interests with deep academic expertise in End User Computing related disciplines. The Board appoints a number of officers who fill the traditional roles suggested by their titles.

Control over day to day operations, ordinary business decisions, and research & development planning is vested in The Institute's Executive Director & Chief Technology Officer.

From time to time, The Board and its Officers consult with members of a voluntary Advisory Board about current and future directions for The Institute. This Advisory Board reflects an even wider range of stakeholder interests and academic expertise than our necessarily smaller Board of Directors. It should also be noted that members of our Advisory Board have no formal decision making role, nor are they subject to any of the attendant legal obligations that arise from membership in the governing Board.

Feedback and suggestions from the General Public are always encouraged and given due consideration.

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Are We Selling Something?

We cannot stress too strongly that we are a charity. We are not selling anything and are not developing a commercial OS or computer. The Institute for End User Computing, Inc. was founded to engage in pre-competitive research and educational activities for the benefit of the public at large.

This means that while we will eventually develop a Reference Implementation of a new End User Computing Platform (in other words — a working prototype). We won't be selling it in any mass-market sense. We may arrange for a small run to be produced for research and evaluation by small targeted End User populations, but this will be done to improve the design itself and not for any financial gain.

Then, when we do have a design in place, we will give it away and share it with everyone including Home Brew computer users, high tech startups, and large established computer vendors so they can incorporate our advances in real products to improve your lives.

Moreover, by making the right design choices we can insure the interoperability of systems based on our design, so if at some point there were different variants of our new platform based on one or more of today's dominate operating systems, a program written for any one would work with all of the others. But our goal isn't to follow a "write once, run everywhere" lowest common denominator approach (i.e. the cross-platform code model of Java), but rather to raise the bar dramatically higher to look beyond today's desktop paradigm. Indeed, with the right component architecture we can guard against vendor lock-in and insure a level playing field where vendors of all sizes can coexist and cooperate or compete to best serve your needs.

So, it is only natural to ask what do we offer? The answer is that we are offering you the chance to support a research program that will cut through all of the funding games, petty rivalries, short-term market-driven pragmatism, and legacy system drag of today's institutionalized initiatives.

We offer researchers and developers a chance to think outside the box starting with a fresh slate. We offer you — the End User — a chance to make a difference and break the gridlock that promises little more than an endless stream of insecure, expensive, and all to often incompatible upgrades and bug patches.

The Status Quo isn't working for you, but we will!

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Will Our Research Be Free?

The Institute's research and integration work will be free of cost to the degree that the Intellectual Property in question is donated to or funded by The Institute. Since there are already countless IP Patents in existence and since we are not in the business of making and selling products as a business, we won't necessarily use public funds to acquire commercial use rights to every idea we make use of. However, in some cases we may opt to do so if it proves to be the only way to extinguish a proprietary right that might otherwise block the widespread adoption of a key technology.

In other cases, we will be content to insure that there is a free interface through which multiple proprietary implementations could do battle in the market place. The key point is that we need only acquire sufficient IP Rights to develop a sound platform design and reference research implementation.

This means that we might have to draw on 3rd party technologies whose development had been funded with private dollars in the commercial sector and with whose owners any commercial ventures wishing to make use of them would have to negotiate appropriate licenses. Nevertheless, we will strive to use public domain and open source technology where possible, with commercial components serving in auxiliary roles where their adoption would not be required.

Moreover, since we won't be in a position to fully compensate the developers of components going into our design and implementation for quite some time, we won't seek exclusive rights to their use. Indeed, provided we can do so in a manner fully consistent with our charitable tax status, we might envision an IP Policy under which contributors of code that had not been substantially supported with public funds would retain a non-exclusive right to directly commercialize their work independently of its use by The Institute. If you have expertise in this particular niche of IP Tax and Not-for-Profit Law and could help us in addressing these questions of IP ownership and Fair Compensation, we would like to hear from you.

We may also at some point provide some minor services as a way to advance our charitable purposes for which we would charge a fee to defray our costs (and if applicable pay the appropriated tax on any resulting revenue).

In any case, our sole objective is to advance public goals and to make the next generation of End User Computing technology as open and free as possible and we will in no way be profiting from research funded with public dollars. So while our work product may not be completely free as in beer (as Open Source advocates would say), it will be free of strings hindering innovation.

That said, we will have bills to pay and will need the ongoing support of the public if we are going to serve your needs.

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How Long Will It Take?

When setting up a new organization, one is sorely tempted to set out an optimistic timetable against which progress can be measured, in an effort to show that metrics are in place and to convince one’s backers that there is a firm roadmap in place to insure that the organization reaches its goals. Such planning looks good, particularly if backed up by the Gantt and Pert Charts, Work Breakdown Structures, and Resource Histograms produced with Project Management Software.

Unfortunately, such visual aids (peppered with resource requirements, cost estimates, tentative dates, and milestones along the way) embody extended chains of inference based on countless assumptions that cannot be made with any real grounding in the context of a new organization trying to do something fundamentally new. Worst of all, such pseudo planning raises false expectations that are almost certain to be frustrated casting a pall over the fledging entity. Indeed, by buying into such inappropriate metrics, organizations often set themselves up to fail by their own poorly chosen definitions of what constitutes success.

We will not fall into this trap, because we know that we can’t control either the rate at which we will be able to attract people and resources or the rate at which meaningful progress will be made towards our technological goals. This uncertainty is the fundamental nature of both non-profit sector startups and technology integration & transfer initiatives. The Institute will need to capitalize on opportunities as they arise; but it won’t be in a position to control events for quite some time.

To pretend otherwise might seem expedient in our short-term quest for initial funding, but it would be short sighted and demonstrate a lack of integrity on our part. For as soon as the inevitable unfolding of events were to deviate from our planning, our stakeholders would realize the plans were illusory and conclude that we couldn’t deliver on our promises - making it impossible to secure future support.

So instead, we will be clear about the nature of our ongoing work and ask supporters to become our partners in an evolutionary learning process that moves us all closer to our objectives without making any false promises of a timetable, sure and certain. However, we will employ traditional project management techniques where they are clearly applicable.

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Can We Hire You?

As much as we would like to be able to staff a small lab of full time researchers to work on the core of our new platform design and coordinate the activities of our many colleagues at other sites, our organization is still too young to have built up a reliable revenue stream to fund such activities. Indeed, at this point no one connected with The Institute for End User Computing, Inc. is drawing any compensation despite many thousands of hours of intense work getting The Institute off the ground.

Thus at this point, we most need volunteers for pure research, substantive development, and less glamours but no less critical staff functions.

When we do eventually have reliable sources of funding that potential employees could count on to support their families with some measure of job security, we will give initial consideration to individuals who have previously supported The IEUC as volunteers. Of course there are many factors that we will have to take into consideration before extending any job offers, but all things being equal, we will try to stand by those who have stood by us. Indeed, while we can't offer pay at this time, we are already working with volunteers to provide them with public recognition, mentoring, and technical guidance in advancing their respective research interests.

If you would like to volunteer or would like us to keep you in mind for any future openings, we are more than happy to keep resumes on file for up to one calendar year at a time. Just Contact Us for details.

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Can I Join The Institute?

The Institute for End User Computing, Inc. is not organized as a Membership Organization.

This means that we assess no dues, nor do we issue membership certificates. We encourage Members of the Public to consider supporting The IEUC financially and to freely share their views with us, but doing so does not entitle one to vote in any Institute decision making nor does it give one a formal role in selecting our Directors and Officers.

That said, ultimately, we all serve at the pleasure of the General Public — for without your support we can never achieve our full potential to make your life better.

So we do urge you to Join our Quest for a better tomorrow and to volunteer to work on Institute Projects!

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Can I Work Off A Community Service Sentence at the IEUC?

Unfortunately, no.

Since we are a virtual organization with no physical offices we are unable to provide verification of the amount of time you expend on our behalf.

Accordingly, IEUC Service can not be used to fulfill any Court Ordered Community Service that may be mandated as part of a sentence or otherwise required under a plea bargain agreement.

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