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The nature of our initiative

A new approach to knowledge

To understand the nature of our initiative, think about the world at the twilight of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance. Recall the devastating religious wars, terrifying epidemics... Think of the scholastics discussing "how many angels can dance on a needle point?" Bring to mind the iconic image of Galilei in house prison, a century after Copernicus, whispering eppur si muove into his beard.

The problems of the epoch were not resolved by focusing on those problems, but by a slow and steady development of a whole new approach to knowledge. Several centuries of unprecedented progress followed. Could a similar advent be in store for us today?

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 ideas of our best minds were drowning in an ocean of glut. Vannevar Bush, a giant, diagnosed that more than a half-century 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 add up to a whole new approach to knowledge. And that this new approach to knowledge leads to sweeping changes of the ways in which core issues are understood and handled.

Our proposal

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality", Buckminster Fuller observed. "To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” We offer knowledge federation as a model or a prototype of a new way to work with knowledge (or technically a paradigm); and of a new academic institution that can develop this new 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. We may now need to depend this resource more than we ever did! Considering the importance of this issue, we spared no effort in developing and describing an alternative. And we also set the stage for this alternative's academic and real-life deployment and scaling.

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

Introducing knowledge federation

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-order units of meaning. The meaning we assign to this keyword is similar as in political and instuitutional federation, where smaller entities unite to achieve higher 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 that in an idiosyncratic way – by describing the mechanisms of nature, and explaining the phenomena as their consequences.

So why are we developing an initiative around such an everyday human activity?

A natural approach to knowledge

What we have undertaken to put in place is what one might call the natural way to federate knowledge. Think on the one side of all the knowledge we own – in academic articles and also broader; include the heritage of the world traditions, and the insights being produced by creative people daily. Think on the other side of all the questions we need to have answered. Think about the insights that could inform our lives, the rules of thumb that could direct our action. You may imagine that these latter ones occupy distinct levels of generality or abstraction. Then you may imagine knowledge federation as whatever we the people may need to do to maintain, organize, update, and keep up to date, the core elements of this hierarchy. Put simply, knowledge federation is the creation and use of knowledge as we the people need it – to be able to understand the world around us; to be able to live and act in it in an informed, sustainable or simply better way.

Introducing systemic innovation

Revisioning modernity

While we shall illustrate knowledge federation by presenting a broad variety of direction-setting insights and principles, there is a single general one from which all those other ones might follow. Think of it as a rule of thumb pointing to a better way to be creative. Or as a signature theme from which an Enlightenment-like change may result in our own time.

We use the above metaphorical image or ideogram to explain the nature of this insight.

By depicting modernity as a bus with candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram points to an incongruity and a paradox: In our hither-to modernization, we have forgotten to modernize something quite essential!

If you'd prefer this to be concrete, you may interpret the light of those headlights as information; and the headlights themselves as the way in which we create it and use it. The paradox then acquires an overtone of irony: Aren't we living in the age of information? Isn't our handling of information what we have most successfully modernized?

If you like drama, you may think of this ideogram as depicting our ride into the future. For all we know, we may be using our impressive technology and our best efforts to only go faster toward a condition in which we never wanted to be. But there's a remedy! We may turn our risky ride into the future into a safe and sane one by doing no more than just completing modernization.

It will be best, however, if you'll consider the Modernity ideogram as an invitation to stop and think; as something like the Zen koan – which the practitioners of Zen use to disrupt habitual patterns of thought. If you'll manage to do that, you'll be discovering nuances of meaning of this image as we go along. You'll find out that it has a multiplicity of meanings – and yet that they all point to a single overarching insight, and direction.

Systemic innovation

While we use different keywords to point to those different meanings, we propose to adopt one of them, systemic innovation, as the brand name for a new way in which our creative capabilities are be used; and for a new direction in which our ride into the future now needs to continue.

The message of the Modernity ideogram is, we believe, obvious: Our primary objective, and responsibility, must be to make the whole thing functional or vital or whole. "The whole thing" here may of course be a whole hierarchy of things in which what we are creating has a role.

The reason for this rule of thumb, the practical difference it can make, and how it departs from common practice – are all equally obvious. The dollar value of information is of course large; but it's nothing compared to the value of "the whole thing" (which here metaphorically represents our technology, our daily efforts, our civilization and our future). As proper headlights will dramatically increase the value of the bus as a whole, and improve the future prospects of all of us who are riding in it – so will, as we shall demonstrate on these pages, systemic innovation make a world of difference in all walks of life, wherever it's applied!

To be continued...