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"If I have seen further," Sir Isaac Newton famously declared, "it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Imagine if we would lose this all-important ability, to take advantage of the best ideas of our best minds: What sort of problems, and what situation would result? Imagine if we would then regain it: What opportunities would that open up?

– The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

In Knowledge Federation we have made a discovery. We did not discover that the best insights of our best minds were drowning in an ocean of glut. The giants reached that conclusion long ago, and documented it thoroughly. (But needless to say, this too drowned in an ocean of glut, and remained without effect.) And anyhow – what else could one expect in a society where vast and rapidly growing technological and human resources are used to merely mass-produce and broadcast information?

– The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future.

What we did find out (when we began to develop and apply the remedial praxis we are calling knowledge federation) was that now, just as in Newton's time, when we 'stand on the shoulders of giants' we begin to see the world differently. When we 'connected the dots' – i.e. when we combined the relevant insights across the boundaries of academic disciplines and fields of interest and traditions, the result was radically different answers to core questions including the nature of truth and meaning, in what way might happiness be successfully pursued, what still impedes our freedom and democracy, and what technological innovation may need to be like to benefit us far more than it currently does. We also found out that those emerging new ways of conceiving human and societal realities are not just random departures from our habitual ones, but that they form a coherent system of ideas or paradigm.

Thus it turned out that we already own the knowledge needed to ignite a change reminiscent of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, or “a great cultural revival”, which a giant identified as necessary in our condition. What is missing is the ability to identify the relevant pieces and combine them together.


– To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality", observed Buckminster Fuller. "To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

What is being proactively problematized on these pages is the way we handle a most precious resource – human creativity (or insight, ingenuity, capacity to envision and induce change...) and its fruits accumulated through the ages. By developing and showcasing knowledge federation we undertake to:

  • Demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that a radically better alternative is possible
  • Streamline the co-creation, real-life deployment and scaling and perpetual evolution of such an alternative

In each of the main four modules of this website we illuminate this alternative from a specific angle. In each of them we demonstrate a different knowledge federation technique or set of techniques by applying them to that purpose.

See

Federation through Images, where we look at the fundamental or academic side of knowledge federation. Our idea of "good" knowledge and "good" information evolved since antiquity, and now finds its foremost expression in science and philosophy. We show that the state of the art in science and philosophy requires that we change this idea, in a way that empowers us to respond directly to the vital contemporary needs of people and society. To explain why, we use metaphorical and often funny, paradoxical and thought-provoking images called ideograms. In knowledge federation ideograms have a similar role as mathematical formulas do in conventional science – they condense a long analysis into an insight that can be recognized at a glance. By combining the ideograms, the IMAGES module renders an accessible, cartoon-like introduction to knowledge federation's philosophical underpinnings.

Federation through Stories, where we use vignettes (short, lively, catchy, sticky... real-life people and situation stories) to explain and empower some of the core ideas of our giants. A vignettes liberates an insight from the language of a discipline and enables any of us to 'step into the shoes' of a leading thinker and 'look through his eye glasses'. By combining vignettes into threads, and by weaving threads into patterns and patterns into gestalts, we create a hierarchy of insights that can inform the handling of core practical issues including happiness, religion, innovation and governance.

Federation through Applications, we present knowledge federation as creative frontier. About 40 prototypes cover a spectrum of creative direction that this new approach to ignites and requires to. What might scientific communication be like to federate core insights across disciplines? What might public informing need to be like to enable us to take advantage of those insights? In what we may education need to be different to empower our coming generations to develop the emerging societal paradigm and ignite a new era of progress? How might knowledge federation help a core field of activity (such as design and innovation) redefine itself? How might "addiction" be defined in a new way, to empower us to avoid using new technology to create new and unrecognized addictions?

Federation through Conversations, where we streamline our main course of action – the creation of real-life knowledge federation processes and infrastructures. The core technique is the dialog, which empowers change just as the debate – its present-day counterpart – disables it. Through public dialogs we both place the insights of the giants into the public sphere, and engage the public to add their own insights, so that our understanding of core issues might evolve further. We orchestrate a social process through which the public may understand and handle core issues in entirely new ways.