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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", observed Buckminster Fuller. "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, or a natural handling of 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. Include the insights produced daily by creative people. 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. You may then 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; and 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. You may 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. Then the paradox will acquire 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 some no good end of the road. But there is 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. If you'll use it as the practitioners of Zen use the Zen koan – to disrupt the habitual patterns of thought. If you manage to do that, you'll be discovering nuances of meaning of this image as we go along. You'll find out that the bus with candle headlights has a multiplicity of interpretations – and that they all point to a single overarching one.

Systemic innovation

While we use different keywords to point to different meanings of the Modernity ideogram, we single out one of them, systemic innovation to point to what they all have in common. We consider the systemic innovation to be the signature theme of an emerging cultural paradigm. We propose it as the brand name and as a rule of thumb, pointing to a radically better way to be creative.

The message of the Modernity ideogram is, we believe, obvious: Our primary objective, and responsibility, should be to make the whole thing functional or vital or whole. This "whole thing" 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 the common practice and from the values from which our common practices stem, are all made clear by this image. The dollar value of the headlights might be factor to consider; but it's insignificant compared to the value of the whole big thing (the bus might be interpreted our technology, as the results of our daily work or as our civilization). It is this difference – between the dollar value of the headlights, and the value of the larger whole and of all of us in it – that you may keep in mind as the core of our proposal, as our "value proposition". We shall see how systemic innovation, in its various disguises, opens up vast opportunities for value creation that have been hidden to us while we made choices "in the light of the candle"; while our creative action was oriented toward the dollar value alone; while we didn't know better than to reproduce those candles (perpetuate what the people were doing in the past, without asking whether that still fulfills its purpose). As proper headlights will dramatically increase the usefulness and the safety and in sum the value of the bus – so will, as we shall demonstrate again and again, systemic innovation make a world of difference in all walks of life, wherever it's applied!

Guided evolution of society

Think of the movement of the bus as representing our ride into the future – which is really our societal and cultural and technological evolution, and the resulting evolution of our condition. We use the keyword guided evolution of society to point to the difference that suitable knowledge could make. Think, again, of the advent of the Enlightenment. Think of all the prejudices dispelled. Think of the liberation, and the improvements, that resulted.

Imagine if all this were just a prelude! Imagine if a new turn in our evolution could be begun by an enlightened approach to knowledge – where knowledge and knowledge work are themselves liberated from prejudices, and created and used in ways that serve us incomparably better than the current ones do.

Imagine good knowledge permeating our lives. Imagine it changing our values, our lifestyle, our habitual responses. Imagine it empowering the arts to soar to new heights. Imagine it helping us understand and handle life's basic issues just as differently as the world we inhabit now is different from the one where Galilei was imprisoned.

Knowledge federation

You may understand knowledge federation as the resolution of the modernity paradox by definition. We have given this name to the quest for (or technically a prototype of) more suitable 'headlights'. Knowledge federation is also the name of a prototype institution (technically the transdiscipline), which can orchestrate this quest.

Also relevant here is this subtler message that the Modernity ideogram may bear: No sequence of improvements of the candle will produce the light bulb. The resolution of our quest is in the exact sense of the word a paradigm – a fundamentally and thoroughly new way to conceive of knowledge and organize its handling. To create the light bulb, we need a new set of principles; we need a model; we need a realistic way to replace our candles with light bulbs, in practical reality. The purpose of these pages is to provide exactly the guiding light that is needed – so that we may waste no more time trying to improve those 'candles', when it's the 'light bulbs' we really need, and want.

Knowledge federation and systemic innovation are so close in meaning, that at the high level of generality where we are now they may well be considered synonymous. When we do knowledge federation right, when we "stand on the shoulders of giants", then systemic innovation is seen as just an informed or effective or safe or (as Erich Jantsch wrote, from whom we've adopted this keyword) rational way to be creative. And when systemic innovation is applied to our work with knowledge and information, the knowledge federation is the result.

Like the Yin and the Yang in Oriental cosmologies, knowledge federation and systemic innovation are two alternative principles and ways of working that continuously recreate one another.

Design epistemology

At the heart of any deep change – or of a paradigm, be it societal or academic – is a change of the way in which knowledge is conceived of; and of the assumptions we use to assign knowledge its value. Galilei was not tried for claiming that the Earth was in motion, that was just a technical detail. His epistemology was what got him in trouble, his belief "that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture." Galilei was required to "abjure, curse and detest" such dangerous beliefs. Can you imagine the next such epistemology change, taking place in our own time?

We let design epistemology point to such a change. We let it mean considering knowledge, and knowledge work, as functional parts in a larger whole. We let it mean that we'll let the extent in which knowledge informs and completes our lives and our society determine its value – and not whether it's been created in one of our traditional ways; or whether it fits our traditional worldview.

See

Federation through Images

Our ideas of what constitutes "good" information have been evolving since antiquity, and they now find their foremost expression in science and philosophy. In Federation through Images we show that the developments in 20th century's science and philosophy empower a disruptive change.

We render the gist of our initiative, as well as core insights of leading thinkers, as metaphorical and often paradoxical images or ideograms. The result is a cartoon-like introduction to the philosophical underpinnings of a refreshingly novel approach to knowledge.

Federation through Stories

In Federation through Stories our focus is on another disruptive change that developed in 20th century – the advent of new information technology. We shall see that (to quote Douglas Engelbart, the lead hero of one of our related stories) "digital technology could help make this a better world". But that to manifest this possibility, "we've also got to change our way of thinking" – in exactly the way that was pointed to by the Modernity ideogram! We shall see that what we are calling systemic innovation and knowledge federation are the missing link in a chain of developments that were envisioned (incredibly!) as early as in 1951 – but were hitherto not completed or put to use.

We use vignettes – short, lively, catchy, sticky... real-life people and situation stories – to explain and empower some of the core ideas of daring thinkers. A vignette liberates an insight from the language of a discipline and enables a non-expert to 'step into the shoes' of a leading thinker, 'look through his eye glasses'. By combining vignettes into threads, and threads into higher units of meaning, we take this process of federation all the way to the kind of direction-setting principles we've just been talking about.

Federation through Applications

In Federation through Applications we present a complete prototype of an emerging academic and societal paradigm, rendered as a portfolio of prototypes.

Federation through Conversations

In Federation through Conversations we focus on a development analogous to the Humanism and the Renaissance – of new views and values that can bring our societal and cultural evolution into sync with our technological one. By positing unconventional views on issues that matter, we ignite public dialogs. And by developing those dialogs, we evolve a collective mind capable of weaving threads of thought into surprising conclusions.