"The goal of factionAR, then, is to recreate the creative conditions once delivered by such a blogosphere through the use of a software code which creates spaces of multi-sensorial, multi-intellectual, multi-layer and multi-path experiences: unpredictabilities where the objects so contained demonstrate, more and more, a very real agency — a very real ability to engage and act alone, and in essentially surprising ways."

Mil Williams, Founder, Better Biz Me Ltd

Empowering people and organisations to deliver — resiliently, reliably and predictably — original, partisan and unpredictable thought, using assisted-reality tools.

The factionAR project proposes that VR, traditional AR, and other technologies to help process the many potential outputs, be used to develop open-source and branded code that allows a working environment to be delivered which maximises the creativity and business-sense of individuals, teams, and departments.

Problem

Good business practice suggests we should identify a problem which customers actually need solving, before we alight on a technology: otherwise, cart before venerable horse.

This, then, is our problem:

• In a world of multiplying specialisms — within organisations, sometimes within a department, often between interest groups, especially up and down a hierarchy — people rarely speak the same language.

• In order for a decision to be taken on the basis of someone else's high-level domain expertise — their efficient "thinking without thinking" — we have to trust what an expert says without understanding their words.

• What's more, sometimes we get the feeling that they don't entirely understand us.

• Either way, in order to trust their intuition, we ask them for traditional data so they can back up their specialist assertions to our satisfaction.

• Even this traditional data is often so specialised, that we still have very little comfort when we a) take our strategic or operational decisions based on what the expert believes; or b) make some long-term policy or other.

• In many contexts — crime, auditing, education, medicine — mission-critical decisions are taken by decision-makers (judges, accountants, headteachers, consultants, to only touch on the very top of these corresponding hierarchies), when helicopter views prevail.

• In the end, we take decisions on "what feels right": and often, what feels right is what allows us to sense if everything goes wrong, at least we are covered by expertise we still don't understand.

Early-adopting customer

This is our proposed early-adopting customer:

Everyone and anyone who uses high-level domain expertise — either:

• someone else's in order to take mission-critical decisions; or

• their own in order to do the same; or

• when it's clear that we shoulder the blame were something to go very wrong, it's ourselves and our own intuitive perception and judgement which will inform someone else's transcendental conclusions.

A process — NOT a technology — once delivered

To resolve our problem for our early-adopting customer, we feel we have identified a process — NOT a technology — which once worked fabulously to deliver on similar goals.

Our analogy therefore — and its corresponding implications — might run as follows:

• Blogging is different from traditional writing, not primarily in the tools used (over time, convergence has taken place) but, rather, more importantly in the sense that its process involves bouncing off the ideas of other writers on a daily basis before being able to deliver the content.

• Blogging at its best, and the so-called blogosphere in which it takes place, involves an unending brainstorming activity, where connections are almost frenetically made through hyperlinking, effervescently multiple readings, parallelisms and other dynamics from the worldwide web way of doing things.

In this way, not just through the written word (as was mainly the blogosphere at its height) but also through artificial realities of a multiple-media nature it will become possible for everyone in an organisation to re-acquire creative skillsets probably mostly lost to youth for the vast majority, as well as acquire and apply focussed instincts more relevant to modern business and other organisations.

"The goal of factionAR is, then, to recreate the creative conditions once delivered by such a blogosphere through the use of a software code which creates spaces of multi-sensorial, multi-intellectual, multi-layer and multi-path experiences: unpredictabilities where the objects so contained demonstrate, more and more, a very real agency - a very real ability to engage and act alone, and in essentially surprising ways."

Mil Williams, Founder, Better Biz Me Ltd

The factionAR project (AR here = Assisted Reality) aims to create and employ transferable tools which deliver working environments — that is to say, workspaces — to people and organisations that, in so doing, guarantee the resilient, reliable and predictable delivery of first-class, game-changing, partisan, and unpredictable thought, by personnel at every level and with every thinking/learning style.

In order to achieve this goal, everyone needs to understand everyone.

1. The transfer shall involve an upskilling period with these individuals and/or organisations, which - alongside the software tools themselves - shall be the product/service factionAR delivers to its clients. Tools to cascade internally will also be developed to enable and facilitate the transfer of technologies even more effectively.

2. The autonomy of the client/s is a primary aim of the project: that is to say, rapid, efficient and competent independence from factionAR as a supplier and provider should be a key measure of success of any B2B relationship thus contracted.

3. As all technologies and knowhow will have significant participation via open-source methods, open-source ways of earning, and open-source mindsets more generally, the company structure necessarily will aim to engage to the fullest specific individuals on a long-term basis to guarantee the differentiating attractiveness of the business offer, when compared to the inevitable current and future competition. This, coupled with an assertive goal of making clients independent of factionAR as a supplier, as soon as upskilling has been achieved, will separate factionAR from the rest of what is still a nascent field.

Technologies such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (VR and AR) are already being used for training purposes, simulators of extreme environments, advertising, and marketing more generally. This will continue to be the case, with branded lock-in between suppliers and customers: copyrighted content will be the norm, as a standard corporate monetisation approach.

The key value-add of factionAR’s project and proposal is that the technologies, relationships, storytelling techniques and processes should - in the best traditions of open-source behaviours - be acquirable at a theoretically zero financial cost, should an individual or organisation wish to spend the time learning how to deliver predictably, and by themselves, the game-changing, unpredictable thought under discussion. Open-source technology and software must also be open to forks, and other redirections of the main thrust of principle communities, and this creativity should be contemplated, overtly and explicitly, from the start.

In order to deliver on the above, the below milestones have been suggested.

Agree upon an appropriate business structure

It has been suggested that one of two models be used for the business structure:

1. The open-source/branded relationship forged by Sun Microsystems, and latterly Oracle, with a community of developers and end-users called OpenOffice.org, at the beginning of the 2000s. It should be recognised here that the end-user side of the equation was more productive than the developer side, and that there are significant challenges embedded in institutions which use both copyleft and copyright in their business models.

2. The city of Bristol, UK, has an independent newspaper called the Bristol Cable, which operates a highly successful media cooperative that, simultaneously, employs a number of different income streams to achieve its current levels of financial, intellectual and conceptual viability.

The first milestone will, therefore, be to establish wider interest in the proposal, in order that the business structure finally chosen achieves the best fit and sustainability, medium-term, desired.

Achieve financial support for start-up

Demonstrating access by factionAR to the software coding and the digital storytelling skills needed is key to achieving an attractive package for potential investors, whether institutional or cooperatively individual.

The model of transferring technologies to a client as soon as possible, rather than maximising the monetisation by locking - in some way - the user in to the provider, is currently being developed and sold by companies such as Google to its prospective corporate clients. The search giant and cloud-service provider is looking to differentiate itself from other competitors such as Amazon, Oracle, Dell, and Microsoft, by talking about equipping its clients precisely not to need it as a supplier, instead of proposing a very long-term relationship of supplier to customer. In this way, Google looks to sell the idea of creative and intellectual independence, at the most inter-dependence; certainly not the corporate lock-in of bespoke technology built on the back of open-source libraries that companies like Oracle and others deliver frequently.

The second milestone, therefore, in the judgement of this author, should be to achieve from potential investors a defined belief in, as well as a competent financial structure for, the project itself, around a clearly structured set of hows just as much as technological and coding whats.

This is the Google ideology, at least on paper. The technology should be presumed: we must all be competent in the field. The value-add of business liberation, of independence from future lock-in, essentially the how we want to do business with our customers, and how we enable and facilitate our customers to do business by themselves, is what should attract the kind of investors with instincts for business proposals which wish to engineer significant business disruption in their chosen fields.

Sectors which could eventually find themselves disrupted

Examples of sectors which could be disrupted via the development and delivery of such tools include the most expected, such as advertising and marketing agencies, but also the less expected, such as the consulting corporations PwC, Deloitte and others. The aim of factionAR to make an individual or corporation self-sufficient in its capability to think both creatively and in a focussed, business-efficient way, in-house, without requiring external or outsourced services, and at the very least to reduce substantially the need for such services to be contracted, is a potential groundbreaking feature of the project.

Another path could, of course, be to deliver - B2B - the tools and knowhow to the consulting corporations in question, but it seems hard - a priori - to understand how this might not produce a conflict of interests.

Other fields which could benefit from such environments, which obviously put top-class creative workspaces into the hands of those who know most about their day-to-day jobs, are the security industry, policing and education, but also art, culture, and the already highly creative sectors. Here, the agency and unpredictably which the workspaces promise to deliver would be a particular benefit to such thinkers.