The Imaginal Institute

Derek Robinson
Founding Fellow

Our resident gentle anarchist and internet philosopher, Derek has been at the forefront of some of the most exciting web programming development.

Some of the remarkable ideas that Derek has generated include:

• With Jason Classon, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the founders of Ludicorp, he participated in creating what was perhaps the first browser-based MMORPG, the “Game Neverending” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Neverending) before it morphed, in 2004, into Web 2.0’s favourite photo-sharing site, Flickr.

• From December 2000 to June 2001, he was employed by KnowNow Inc. in Silicon Valley to do user interface design for their JavaScript based “pub-sub” (publish-subscribe) messaging middleware. The technology developed at KnowNow was a direct precursor of AJAX ("Asynchronous JavaScript and XML"), basis of Web 2.0's migration of application software from isolated, standalone desktops to the always-on connectivity of browser and web.  

• In a newsgroup discussion with Jon Udell (written up in his Byte magazine column, Oct. 4, 2000),  Derek articulated the notion of  “reciprocal syndication” as an alternative to email; a version of the same idea is currently being exploited to in Facebook – cf. http://207.22.26.166/bytecols/2000-10-04.html.

• He wrote what was (as far as he knows!) the first in-browser WYSIWYG editor for HTML, in 20K of JavaScript for Internet Explorer 5.5, in August 2000, thus helping add “Two-Way Web” to the then newly viral “Peer to Peer” (P2P) meme.

• He has engaged in research towards a novel ‘voice puppet’ interface for individuals having severe motor deficits, for the Adaptive Technology Research Centre, University of Toronto, 1999; and on bioinformatics research into new statistical algorithms for knowledge discovery in very large (e.g. protein) databases, 1990-1993. (Presented at the International Joint Congress of Artificial Intelligence, Special Section on AI in Molecular Biology, Chambery 1993.) The ‘coincidence sets’ algorithm would become a core component of the bioinformatics software suite developed by Molecular Mining Corporation, Kingston Ontario. (R.I.P.)

• He was an instructor in Photo-electric Arts / Integrated Media department, Ontario College of Art and Design, from 1986 to 1998.

His publications include:

• “A Primer on Party Planning”, published in Proceedings of a Joint Meeting of the Dutch and British Cybernetics and Systems Groups, University of Amsterdam, 1988.
• “Index and Analogy: a Footnote to the Theory of Signs,” Rivista di Linguistica (part of a special issue on analogical models of language), Pisa 1995.
• Invited contributor (three articles: Analog, Function, Variable) to “Software Studies,” Matthew Fuller, ed., MIT Press, 2008.

Derek is the architect of the Friends3 Platform: a new, Web2.0 construct that will allow people to use their own computers as intranet browsers with internet access, offers next generation archiving capabilities, and will serve as the platform for Fellow Charles Cameron's Hipbone Games.