Auginte was started as a personal tool to prepare for exams. Drawing on paper helped memorizing things, as it included visual and motor memory. Main problem with paper approach was: for the places you needed to add new notes the most – there already was no space left.

So, paper notebook was converted into software, zooming and reference tracking was also introduced. There was lots of experiments with different user interfaces and technologies, also learning more about knowledge management field.

And I realized, that we all emphasize knowledge, innovation, intelligence, dealing with complexity and other buzzwords as most important things in our daily and economy-related world, but still using archaic knowledge-related tools.

We are amazed by new information visualization in science fiction movies, but not implementing them today, keeping it a far future. Why? Is it too complex to implement, is it not needed or not discussed enough, are we all too deep into our own ego to share time for larger innovation?..

With Auginte I want to push knowledge tools to the level of future expectations. Computers will not do all the work for us – they are only tools. Innovation will always be initiated by humans. Augment our intelligence by better using our own perception, memory and attention capabilities.

Every consumer would want software for free and in high quality. Every developer would want biggest revenue with as litter effort as possible. Most of economies are based on balancing between those two, so fairness is kept.

Open source is beautiful, but spend hundreds or even thousands of hours developing a project and give it away or even hear from customers "your product is not good enough, but my time is too expensive, I will not contribute". Open source should be fair for both: users and developers.

For a long time, Auginte was developed as a closed source project, until right business model was found. So software could be both: free and based on project idea: augment, not copy.

Most of open source business models are good for big communities, revenue from non-software products or data kept behind server side. But Auginte started just as a bunch of programs written by one person, where value was created by the use of software and decentralized / personal data.

As with all good startups, new business model must emerge from product / service itself. Auginte business model is simple: give a credit to those, who helped you. This is very old principle: if someone helped us, we feel the debt to help him back in a way we can.

This principle also applies to buying things, but with money most of the credit usually goes to the person who resells the product, not to ones who you think really deserve it. Because who tells contacts of the value-chain, resellers want all the money. This is commonly used economy model, but does it feel fair? Does it feel open?

Auginte is trying to prepare infrastructure, so sharing and augmenting knowledge would feel fair, so it would be open, who and how contributed to information that is valuable to you.

Current knowledge economy uses sell-information-as-a-product, sell-information-as-a-time, patents, advertisement and author-awareness as a business models. But does it feel sufficient? Auginte tries to fill this gap with more / better tools.

It is easy to talk about fairness, while not mentioning, how the author of an infrastructure is paid. There will never be feeling of openness and fairness, when salary is divided by a subjective person. So how about being paid by a software? When everybody can see how and why salary / bonus of every contributor is calculated. Have you imagined creating a pull request to rise your salary? Open salary algorithm is not implemented yet, but that is real openness and fairness in knowledge economy, in Auginte project.