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Introducing knowledge federation

Our discovery

"If I have seen further," Isaac Newton famously declared, "it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." What motivates our initiative is a discovery. We did not discover that the best insights of our best minds were drowning in an ocean of glut. Vannevar Bush, a giant, saw that already seven decades ago. He urged the scientists to focus on this disturbing trend and find a remedy. But needless to say, this too drowned in the ocean of glut.

What we did find out, when we began to develop and apply knowledge federation as a remedial praxis, was that now just as in Newton's time, the insights of giants put together compose a whole new approach to knowledge.

And that this new approach to knowledge, just as the case was in Newton's time, naturally leads to sweeping changes in the ways in which the core issues – the creation of truth and meaning, democracy and power, technological innovation, the pursuit of happiness or wellbeing, religion... – are understood and handled.

Our proposal

“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.” So we built knowledge federation as a model or a prototype of a whole new way to create and use knowledge.

Knowledge federation is both a way of handling knowledge, or technically a paradigm, and an academic institution that develops it as a praxis (informed practice), or technically a transdiscipline.

The issue that 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. And at the point in our history where we may need to depend on it more than we ever did! Considering the importance of this issue, we spared no effort in developing and describing a complete proof of concept; and setting the stage for its academic and real-life deployment and scaling.

By constructing this model, we do not aim to give conclusive answers. Our goal is indeed much higher – it is to open up a creative frontier where the way knowledge is created and handled is brought into focus, and continuously recreated and improved.

Knowledge federation is just knowledge creation

As our logo might suggest, the purpose of knowledge federation is to 'connect the dots' – combine disparate pieces of information and other knowledge resources into higher-level units of meaning. The meaning we assign to this keyword is similar as in political federation, where smaller units unite to achieve a shared purpose, such as greater visibility and impact.

One might say that what we are calling knowledge federation is just what we normally do with information to turn it into knowledge. You may have an idea in mind – but can you say that you really know it, before you have checked if it's consistent with your other ideas? And with the ideas of others? And even then – can you say that your idea is known before other people have integrated it with their ideas?

Science too federates knowledge; citations and peer reviews are there to secure that. But science does its knowledge federation in its own peculiar way – by describing the mechanisms of nature, and by explaining the observable phenomena as their consequences.

Why are we then building our initiative around this everyday human activity?

There is a natural way to federate knowledge

What we have undertaken to put in place is what one might call the natural</p> way to federate knowledge. On the one side we have what we know – in academic articles, and also in all other traditions and forms of knowing. On the other side we have what we above all need to know. You can imagine that as a collection of themes or questions – which exist on different orders of generality or abstraction. So you may imagine this question side as a hierarchy. You may now imagine knowledge federation as whatever we the people may need to do to maintaining, organize, update – and keep up to date – various core elements of this hierarchy. Put simply, knowledge federation is the creation of the kind of knowledge we the people have in order to understand the world around us, and to be able to live and act in it in a suitable, functional or "good" way. </p>

Here we keep things simple