Well here it is November 1998 and this site is still a total mess!

I won't publicize the site until its cleaned up a bit, but its a real catch 22 between getting support for the project so I can stop chasing other ways of making a living and creating a working model of the software before we "go public" .

At this juncture my vision is to explore the possibility of financing my dream for humanity by making the web-based consensus-building / knowledge-concentrating software tools needed to build it available as a commercial product. The internet could definitely use a working "automatic bullshit detector" right about now. So could the whole world don't you think?

It seems that the best way to make lots of money quickly these days is to invent some software in the growth path of one of the big companies and become acquired by a cash rich companies that can't do anything but gobble up start-ups. The need for the kind of software needed to build the wisdombase is obvious (see KnowledgeFilter).

If it already existed I would just use it to start creating the wisdombase and go directly into non-profit mode and try to raise the capital to hire a staff to build what I call the KnowSys skeleton; an interactive mega-encyclopedia of human self-knowledge drawing from the major lines of thought spanning science, philosophy, psychology and religion (prototype starts at: The Answer Machine).

Ultimately it will be a non-profit resource for humanity. It can be nothing less. The other approach is to go for foundation money right away and to develop the software as a source of support from within the non-profit. Any ideas?

I'd love your help and feedback right now. If you are reading this it is because you are one of a small handful of people I am appealing to for help. Please send any ideas to michael@wisdombase.org

A little personal background on me and the KnowSys Project:

Several years ago I found myself in the midst of the whirlwind, fast paced lifestyle of a successful video producer. Being fortunate enough to have turned my passion for travel into a successful business, I often met retired people in exotic places in the world who were really much too old to travel. It struck me that so many people retire with gobs of money when its really too late for them to enjoy the fruits of their success. I was also beginning to realize that money was no longer the limiting factor in my life.

So I decided to get off the business treadmill and borrow a few years of my retirement from the end of my life and put it in the middle. I sold my successful production company and the copyrights to my travel programs and slowed down enough to let my compass settle.

What I found beckoning me on the still waters that I was so fortunate to encounter was my lifelong quest for personal knowledge, both spiritual and scientific. (I have been irrespressibly curious about just about everything since I was a little boy ) I continued the interdisciplinary studies I began at UC Berkeley in the seventies and was struck by the lack of communication between disciplines such as behavioral and biological psychology, anthropology and philosophy. I would often wish I could initiate a dialog between an author of one book I was reading and the author of another. As a way to bring these various fields into communication I set out to produce an interactive CD rom encyclopedia of human self-knowledge using multi-tracked hypertext and a user friendly "query routing system" interface. The subject matter was human nature and self-help/personal empowerment, approached from every available perspective, from brain chemistry and evolutionary psychology to depth psychology and Eastern philosophy. My goal was to create a large scale inter-discipinary integration for myself and to bring together these various perspectives in a way that was accessible to non-experts. As I began to gather material from "experts" which was often contradictory, I began to think about sending beta versions of my project to the various specialists for their feedback on how their discoveries and insights fit into a bigger picture (an early form of groupware). At that time I was working in Hypercard, the predecessor to the web, which was designed by my friend Bill Atkinson (who also developed the Macintosh and the graphical interface with Andy Hertzfeld). Bill told me that this was exactly the kind of application he envisioned for hypercard, but that I should switch to a more practical collaborative model using HTML and put the project on the web. And so The KnowSys Project was born. I already had some background and interest in artificial intelligence and expert systems and I quickly realized that if I could create a large scale groupware expert system shell, the storage, sorting and communication capabilities of the web could turn my little CD rom project into a powerful public resource for humanity. As I began to work on the software needed to automatically collate and filter viewpoints and opinions, I realized that a large scale collaborative expert system shell had huge commercial potential for the information overload environment of the internet (and intranets) as well. So now I am working on creating a software product that could be placed in the growth path of a large company with the ultimate goal of raising the capital to develop the (non-profit) KnowSys Project. To find out more about that please proceed to: KnowledgeFilter

Again, any feed back or offers of support of any kind would be gladly welcomed.

Thank you for your time and attention!

email me at: michael@wisdombase.org

Michael Heumann 11/18/98

1717 Darby Rd. Sebastopol Ca 95472

or feel free to call me at: (707) 829-0127 or fax (707) 829-9542

namaste