In 2002 I co-founded a think tank called Blue Oxen Associates. We were born out of a mailing list devoted to talking about Doug Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution. I found the mailing list because I was a recovering system administrator taking a break to get a masters degree. I studied Engelbart, Information Organization, Knowledge Representation, Human Computer Interaction and related topics. I connected with Eugene Kim, the other founder, because we both had a "let's not just talk, let's also make some stuff" attitude.

The core issues we thought about were:

• Hard stuff is hard.
• Some hard stuff is so hard that we must collaborate to solve it.
• Collaboration itself is hard.
• Collaboration needs to be augumented with tools.

Blue Oxen set out to pursue doing and researching augmented high performance collaboration, establishing what became known as the Blue Oxen Way.

We needed to bootstrap our information processing. We wanted to more effectively access, use and re-use information.