Sunday, January 15, 2012

Editorial: Writing the Book--- Public Invention 101

Looking at the grandest scale, the purpose of PIFAM is to write a book entitled Public Invention 101: How to Save the World for Dummies. 
I once had the pleasure of attending a lecture and panel discussion by C.A.R. Hoare, Edsger W. Dijkstra, and Ben Kuipers. (Hoare and Dijkstra are both winners of the Turing Award, the highest honor a Computer Scientist can receive.) Hoare pointed out that the introductory textbook on Physics was already written and unlikely to change. The introductory textbook for Computer Science, a much younger discipline, is still being written, and that it is a great ambition for a young scientist to add a single line to this textbook. The real geniuses, he said, will remove a line.
There are books on how to be get patents. How to be more creative. How to think like Einstein or da Vinci. But we must admit that when it comes to Public Invention, that is, invention in the public good, the canon is far from closed. I don't think any books really give practical advice on reifying an unmonetizable invention---that is, moving from ideas to social benefit.  Brenda Laurel's The Utopian Entrepreneur comes close.  
Mankind has made some progress constructing large, well-funded organizations that can, over long periods of time, produce astounding results. However, this process has not been made personal. Just as the personal computer empowered individuals in a way that mainframe computers did not, we as an organization must seek to empower ever smaller groups of people and individuals. We need to create a handbook of Public Invention. I expect this will take decades if not centuries to write. I personally barely know where to begin, and certainly can't claim to be an authority---though I don't intend to let  that stop me.


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