R.D.A stands for Research, Development, Application.  Using this process, it is our goal to create useful new tools in as many vital dimensions of human life as we can.   Such as …

Communication – This most vital aspect of human life, very directly, affects the very quality of our life.  Quality communication enables co-operation in the creation of solutions to life’s challenges.

While the internet has allowed for faster communication and social networks have allowed for mass communication, neither have substantially raised the quality of the communication itself.

The U.M.P platform and its various editions can improve the quality of communication between groups and individuals. This is done by providing a goal oriented structure and tools with which participants communicate can more fully and reach more informed and holistic decisions & agreements. The U.M.P helps in both the giving and receiving of communication.

Networking – For many people, social, business & community networks are a huge part of life and also ripe for re-imagining and improvement. 

Applying our unique abstraction to this aspect will be very interesting and may just create the magic combination of features and incentives users are looking for.   BubbleTheory.io is an experimental, proof-of-concept of a next generation digital networking tool.

Education – Britney’s Whole & Healthy Kitchen is our first working brand in the realm of education.  The Kitchen Alchemy course helps people to set their mindset and upgrade their skills to create a healthy, balanced and delicious home cooked routine.

Also in our pipeline, the CFT-1 will one day, become a shining example of a new paradigm in education.

Productivity – In the realm of productivity, our Time Saver’s Toolbox helps us every day to our daily computer work.  We first built it for ourselves to help us save time while we work.  It has continued to save us time, many many times.  Check it out, maybe it can help you.

Our AppStarterStack is a bare-bones version of the architecture on which we build all of our software products.  It allows for quicker production of high quality, production-ready, multi-platform software.  Currently we are able to  build clients for Windows, Mac OS X, Android & iOS.   We made this architecture available to be licensed and used by other startups or developers. (By 2023 all our software will be able to run in the browser as a web app.)

Collaboration – In the coming years we plan to apply our abstraction to the realm of resource and project management.  It is this we will use to build and run the first Center for The One location.  More on this in the futures.

Our mission and direction were sealed by 2 seminal events that took place a few months apart from each other.

The Early Days

The first of these occurred on December 21, 2010, when Britney Shawley held a small get-together to celebrate the winter solace.  Tom was among the 5 friends she invited to attend.   That night, while in passionate conversation we made an agreement to dedicate ourselves to somehow helping to solve some of the world’s fundamental problems.  We wanted to make a dent in  the collective work that must be done to eliminate needless suffering in the world.  

We wondered, where could we have the most amount of impact? Naturally being big thinkers we collectively identified education as one aspect of the world that could be modernized and vastly improved.

We concluded that we could help to bring lasting fundamental change by creating new paradigms and ways of doing things, in education.

Starting the very next day, with this goal in mind, and essentially for scratch, we began the journey of building a ‘model’ for education we had yet to think of or understand.

This place, code named ‘Center for The One’, is a place of education and also a community center.  Offering educational courses, based on the needs and choices of the community itself.  Offering also, programs and events, suited perfectly for the needs of its community.

The CFT-1’s 4 core principles are:

• Education
• Co-Operation
• Contribution
• Enjoyment

By the end of 2012 we had compiled a unique combination of ideas  and around  which we could structure a repeatable education and event delivery system.  Through our research, we documented the practical ways in which the CFT-1 would meet its promises and make create amazing learning experiences.  We first presented our idea to a growing community here in Ontario, Canada, but were unable to find traction.  It seemed as if our idea seemed too big (for us) to do (at the moment).

As our vision of the CFT-1 became clearer through our research and documentation process, certain other things also became clearer.

1. The CFT-1 was software as much as anything else.  Software helps methods and processes to be flexible and easy to use while being entirely repeatable.  The CFT-1 is a formula that belongs inside software to be most useful, though it is simple enough to do on pen and paper, but it can be most effective as software.
2. It is very difficult to transfer enthusiasm for such a big idea, without the idea first becoming smaller, and more plausible and real.  Or without having backing from those who have resources to develop it.
3. We had lots to learn and lots of research to do before we could legitimately build the first Center for the One.  It was and is a gigantic undertaking because of the starting point itself 
4. The software tools needed to implement this system at any meaningful scale, seemed to not be available yet.
5. It was not reasonable for us to hope someone else will build the software we need ourselves and want to give to others.
6. Building a CFT-1 will be a culmination of many other steps that will come first. 

We can’t wait until there is a Center for the One,  we think people will love it. It will be a ‘one of a kind’ kind of place, until its not of course 😉

The Golden Rule

The second event which helped set our destiny occurred in the spring of 2011, a few months after the first. During a discussion on the kinds of services we would like to offer at the CFT-1.  One idea was to offer conflict resolution (mediation) services.

Somehow, the conversation shifted to “computer technology”, and just how useful and reliable it has been to humanity, and how it is transforming the world.

Computers faithfully follow the laws and rules they are given.  Could this attribute be used to help people in their life relationships and decision making?

At this point, a question was uttered which would again change the course of our lives and set a sure direction for our future endeavors.

Is it possible to put the Golden Rule into an app?

The ‘golden rule’, as we are using it, is the rule that can help people to relate to each other peacefully.

The Golden Rule is the principle of treating others as one wants to be treated. “Various expressions of this fundamental moral rule are to be found in the tenets of most religions and creeds through the ages, testifying to its universal applicability”. – Wikipedia

In other words …

• We help others because we want to be helped in our time of need
• We let other speak because we have equal need for self expression
• We listen because we also want to be heard
• By empowering others, we empower ourselves
• We acknowledge others equal rights, so that we may have our right acknowledged
• Give what you want receive
• Teach what you would learn
• …and so on and on

Being big fans of and subject to this law ourselves, we fell in love with the idea of creating one or more software tools which reflect this law and help people to apply it successfully.

Can an app help people to use the golden rule in their relationships to others? Could software be created to help people to resolve conflict?  to make group decisions? to build agreements with each-other? and to create win-win solutions?

Of course !!! 

… its possible to put the golden rule into an app.
This is how the idea of a software based mediator was born.
How could we see this idea and not do everything possible to build it?
Today, the software is called the Universal Mediation Program, or UMP for short.

This software mediator would reflect the golden rule by holding participants in a place of equal standing.  Each having an equal voice that can be heard, an equal opportunity to express, to negotiate and to create a win-win agreement.  The software would help people to honor and acknowledge the equal rights of all parties, despite their disagreements.

And this is how our fate was sealed to build a software company, and eventually a network of green and self sufficient CFT-1 locations in communities around the world.

So to bring you to present day, we have spent the years since preparing a foundation for our software tools to be built and marketed to the world. 

Thus far we have built a first version of the U.M.P which turned out to be very much a skill and code building research project.  Despite the good effort, our tests and  trials found one flaw with its design.  It emphasized features and communication tools.  But it should have emphasized ease of use and simplicity first.

In Q4 of 2022, we will begin publishing the first useful versions of UMP v 2.0.  This new version of UMP is built not as a standalone product, but the first to be built using our unique software abstraction.  This U.M.P is way more user friendly, with its deep features nicely tucked away behind simplicity.

As our magic sauce abstraction has developed, its application to other dimensions of human life has spawned many ideas.  We can’t do them all, but we can do a few. 🙂

Where are we now

After reaching a major milestone in early 2022, our technology stack has matured to include our own software architecture for multi-platform applications. On top of which we can build our abstraction and all of its various applications (U.M.P, Bubble Theory and others ).  We now also have amazing technology partners such as Macrometa and many others.

Today, having launched a couple of brands, we are very much in development mode and preparation for some major milestones later in the year.

U.M.P stands for Universal Mediation Program

With the U.M.P we hope to improve the quality of human communication, make it easier to create win-win agreements, to make the highest quality group decisions, and to help achieve conflict resolution wherever it is required and welcomed.

The U.M.P comes in various Editions to help match people with their use case, though in essence they are the same one tool …

• U.M.P for Schools
• U.M.P for Business / Work
• U.M.P for Family
• U.M.P for Couples
• U.M.P for Communities
• U.M.P for You

For reasons too many to count our U.M.P v1.0 became an internal skill building research project.  We learned a lot by building an U.M.P.  It has helped us to better understand what is more important to our users.  In U.M.P 2.0, we are developing a better U.M.P focused on ease of use and a much improved user experience.

The first downloads of U.M.P 2.0 will start becoming available towards Q4 of 2022. 

Visit the U.M.P Website

Request Access to the U.M.P Whitepaper

Because of our technology stack, our FutureOS abstraction, we can undertake research projects in our lab, as experiments rather than full on branding and development efforts.

Bubble Theory is one such experiment.  Is is a tool for creating decentralized social, business and community networks. 

For now, BubbleTheory is just an experiment, a proof of concept of our vision of what digital networking could be.

For years, we have been experiencing and observing the development of social networks on the internet as users.  We have also studied previous attempts at creating new social media networks.

Maybe we can find the right combination of principles and features to create a compelling alternative. We will see.

Please help us understand your view and experience of social media by taking our social media survey.  We will send a token of appreciation to your email at some point in the future. 🙂

Our secret sauce is a unique abstraction we code named FutureOS. It enables us to build many different tools and many different interfaces, all the while using the same underlying architecture and data structures.

This abstraction has some unique features:

• It is a multi-dimensional container of user content & data
• It can describe a small, simple universe or large and complex one
• Its core metaphor and runtime enables the possibility of incredibly unique and helpful interactions with users.
• Each of these universes is distinct but they can be made interoperable when it is so desired.  Creating the potential for a vast ecosystem of services and applications all working within the same digital universe.
• It is made to be able to integrate with external services and APIs

In the future, our abstraction layer will be made open source.  At which point everyone will be able to explore its code, contribute to its growth, or use it to build entirely new applications.  But for a while longer we will be its keepers.

If you want to learn more about our  work, abstraction, contact Tom.

We build our products as desktop and mobile client applications for Windows, OS X, Android and iOS.  By 2023 we will be able to build in-browser based versions of our software.

Our technology stack includes these powerful tools:

1. The Livecode Engine, and all of its features and supported platforms.
   1. Livecode  is a virtual-machine written in C++, it contains 2 scripting languages.
   2. It supports building for Windows, OSX, Linux, Android, iOS, Server, Browser).
   3. Inside the engine we have access to the world wide web and its tools and API’s using a built-in browser or via custom HTTP requests.  The engine’s internet libraries provide super-fast asynchronous communication with external service APIs.
2. Our file format is based on SQLite, only the most deployed and battle tested database technology in history.

Our simple yet powerful technology stack gives us the tools to build nearly anything we can imagine.

Cloud Services

To create the best possible user experience, and security, our approach is to let experts be experts.  For this reason we did not build our own database, object storage, or distributed storage network, instead we partnered with world leading innovators.  We will always put work and effort into giving you increasingly more flexibility and control over where your data is stored. To that end our list of available storage vendors will continue to grow over time.

For storage services we are integrating with some of the world’s best and most modern technology providers …

• Storj , Tebi , Filebase for fast, secure, distributed object storage.
• Macrometa‘s Globally Distributed Multi-Model Database
• DataStax Multi-Region Distributed Database (using Google Cloud, AWS, Azure)
• Global.ID for using the next generation security & privacy paradigm called self sovereign identity.
• Various vendors for password-less authentication
• & various other APIs.

On Decentralization …

It is our goal to build our tools to be decentralized and independent of our continued existence.

Achieving decentralization takes time, and cannot be achieved right at the beginning.  The development team is always the first centralized point of any decentralized project.

We will work hard to create incentives to have other individuals and companies, to share computing power and become hosting & forwarding nodes in an increasingly decentralized network.

So, besides Britney and her WAHK, we have not done a great job building a social media audience for MakeShyft or our software.  If you are interested in our work, please help us out by following us on social media.  We aim to do better and post interesting and relevant content.

• MakeShyft on Facebook
• U.M.P on Facebook
• Time Saver’s Toolbox on Facebook
• Whole & Healthy Kitchen on Facebook