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The nature of our initiative

The way we handle knowledge can make a difference

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... Bring to mind the iconic image of Galilei in house arrest, a century after Copernicus, whispering eppur si muove into his beard; and the iconic image of the scholastics discussing "how many angels can dance on a needle point".

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," Sir 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 nearly three quarters of a century ago. He urged the scientists to focus on this disturbing trend and find a remedy. But needless to say, that 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 just as the case was then, this new approach to knowledge leads to sweeping changes of the ways in which core issues are understood.

Our invention

“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 new way to work with knowledge (or technically a paradigm); and of a new kind of institution that can develop this new new way of working in academic and real-life practice (or technically a transdiscipline).

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, and more generally the way our creative efforts are directed, is brought into focus and continuously recreated and improved.

Introducing knowledge federation

Knowledge federation is just knowledge creation

As our logo might suggest, knowledge federation means 'connecting the dots' – combining 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 institutional 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 its federation in an idiosyncratic way – by explaining the mechanisms of nature, and by explaining the phenomena as their consequences.

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 the 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 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. Imagine them occupying distinct levels of generality. You may then understand knowledge federation as whatever we the people may need to do to maintain, organize, update and keep up to date the elements of this hierarchy.

Put simply, knowledge federation is the creation and use of knowledge we contemporary people need – 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.

Our vision is of an informed post-traditional or post-industrial society – where our understanding and handling of the core issues of our lives and times reflect the best available knowledge; where knowledge is created and integrated and applied with that goal in mind; and where information technology is developed and applied accordingly.

A new paradigm in knowledge creation and sharing

As a way of handling knowledge, knowledge federation is in the proper sense of the word (as Thomas Kuhn defined it and used it) a paradigm. It departs from all traditional approaches to knowledge where the goal is to create a single "reality picture", with which everything that is to be considered "real" or "true" is required to be consistent. We consider the dictatorship of any single worldview as an impediment to communication, and to evolution of ideas. We propose to institute the federation of ideas in its stead, where the ideas and the people who proposed them are allowed to preserve, to a certain degree of course, their autonomy and identity. The goal is still to unify them and make both them and our understanding of things coherent – but not at all cost! Sometimes vital ideas just cannot be reconciled. Sometimes they represent distinct points of view – each useful for its own specific purposes, and mutually "incommensurable", as Thomas Kuhn used to say.

Of the technical ideas that make this approach to knowledge work, let us here mention just one, which may be helpful in understanding what is about to follow: In knowledge federation all claims and models, and even the concepts or keywords we use, are conceived as just ways of looking at things. This allows us to define them precisely and rigorously by making conventions, as the mathematicians do: "Let X be..." This will allow us to liberate ourselves from the constraints of the scientific and mathematical language – and still remain in spirit scientific. And to talk in clear and precise terms even about things that are quite abstract and general. We shall see an example right away.

Introducing systemic innovation

Revisioning modernity

By depicting modernity as a bus with candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram helps us point to an incongruity or a paradox. The ideogram depicts a situation where in our hither-to modernization we have forgotten to modernize something quite essential.

Our challenge here is to depart from the all-too-common airy-fairy discourse about creating a better future, and see if we can talk about that in a more precise and structured way. So we'll use the above image to define four keywords that in a more precise way delineate the gist of our initiative. Your challenge is to take them exactly for what they are – not reality statements, but ways of looking at things, which will help us see more, and share what we see more precisely.

Guided evolution of society

If you consider the movement of the bus to be modernity's or our society's 'travel into the future', or in other words our society's evolution, then guided evolution of society may be understood as what is needed to resolve the paradox: Our ride into the future must be illuminated by suitable information. Since the way we presently create and use information will not do, a more suitable way needs to be created.

Please be aware that this is not a statement of fact, but a definition of a way of looking, pointing to a possibility. Our challenge will be to make this possibility palpable and clear on these pages – which we'll do by combining some not sufficiently known yet exceedingly interesting insights of giants.

Systemic innovation

• To be continued...