The Afrecover Project We have a project to help the most desperate areas of Africa. It presumes that some radical ideas need to come into play. What we are doing now isn’t working well. There is no intent to create a new organization. The working strategy is to devise new methods, demonstrate them, and let existing organizations effect the real change. For the time being, the participants are anonymous unless they choose otherwise. There is no threshold for participation. Probably the useful ideas will include trust in community infrastructure, self-organizing complex economies and novel intellectual engagement. Some suggested notions: Business infrastructure: The idea here is that it is an accident of the industrial revolution that the management of capital is conflated with the management of production. The result is corporate influence that subverts the quality of life. “Investment” in Africa is likely to be neocolonial in nature and in the very best case produce societies with the same problems as developed countries. We can do better, and it is in everyone’s interest to test a new model. The so-called “virtual enterprise” decouples central finance from the processes of work, industrial and creative. You don’t need large, slow companies to make state-of-the art cars, for instance. Ironically, the fundamental studies on this new model were sponsored by the US Department of Defense. A successful industrial ecology on this model could improve things everywhere. Scientific infrastructure: The root of the economic food chain is shared with that of the quality of life and is centered on knowledge. Depressed areas deserve to have inventors and innovators, and that depends on strong, indigenous university and associated research systems. This likely can be initially hosted in the medical establishment and tied to health care, resulting in immediate benefit. The West can easily justify sponsoring this solely on the benefits of an early warning system for pandemics. Physical/information infrastructure: Models of local planning are radically different now in the information age, and in areas with unique cultures. Fuel costs and sustainability issues have altered some dynamics. Assumptions of what is best from only a few years ago need to be rethought. Probably, as with the other areas, things discovered in the process will allow everyone to “do it right.” A test case: An example is being worked out, involving the manufacture of mass-customized high tech prosthetic limbs. It has several advantages: the focus on alleviating immediate misery, the engagement of local clinics and the possible use of an highly distributed agile virtual enterprise. Such a system might encourage local entrepreneurs and expertise and be a test bed for western firms to explore a more efficient way of doing business. (Prosthetics are highly individualized items.) This page is hosted by Ted Goranson.

A Project in Advanced Outlining

This area is concerned with an experiment in outlining. “Outlining” in the context of this project is specific to modern displays and characterizes a class of techniques which mix graphical and text conventions. Outlining depends on optionally viewable links, with more advanced outlining using typed links and not restricted to simple trees.

We are working on an ambitious project that advances these graphical-text ideas.

At this site will be reports on our work, together with archived studies in prior art and history. These had previously appeared as a column at ATPM.com.

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