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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 intervention

“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 ways in which knowledge is created and used, and more generally the ways in which our creative efforts are directed, are brought into focus and continuously recreated and improved.

What we are about to share is a description of this model, and an invitation to a conversation. The purpose of the conversation will be to discuss the model and its consequences – and hence make progress toward our mentioned goal.

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 how the phenomena arise as their consequence.

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 reached 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 need – to be able to understand the increasingly complex 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 used accordingly.

A new paradigm in knowledge creation and sharing

As a way of handling knowledge, knowledge federation is in the proper sense of that 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" must 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 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 and 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 a better future, and see if we can structure our conversation in a more precise and more productive way. So we'll use the above image to define four keywords that in a more precise way delineate the gist of our proposal. 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 accurately.

Guided evolution of society

If you'll consider the movement of the bus to be our society's travel into the future, or our society's evolution, then guided evolution of society may be understood as the resolution of the paradox: Our ride into the future, posits the ideogram, must be illuminated by suitable information. The handling of knowledge we've inherited will not suit this purpose; therefore a more suitable way needs to be created.

"But what about all the successes of science?", we imagine you might think. "What of all the information technology? Aren't we living in the Age of Information? Isn't our handling of information the most modern part of modernity?" If you are entertaining such thoughts, then please bear with us, because it's exactly those questions that we want to take up when motivating and describing our model, and in the conversation that will follow.

Systemic innovation

If you'll consider the movement of the bus to be the result of our creative efforts, or of "innovation", then what we are calling systemic innovation is the resolution of the paradox.

We practice systemic innovation when our primary goal is to make the whole thing functional or vital or whole. Here "the whole thing" may, of course, be a whole hierarchy of things, in which what we are doing or creating has a role.

Notice how systemic innovation points to a quite profound change, which subsumes and yet surpasses what we normally understand as "innovation". The dollar value of the headlights may of course a factor to be considered; but it's insignificant compared to the value of the whole bus (which in our metaphor may point to all our technology taken together; or to the results of our daily work; or to our civilization as a whole, or to whatever else may be organizing our efforts and driving us toward a future). It is this difference in value – between the dollar value of the headlights, and the real value of this incomparably larger entity and of all of us in it – that you may bear in mind as systemic innovation's "value proposition". Again and again we'll see systemic innovation make this sort of a difference in value, wherever it's applied.

But looking at the world through the dollar value is not the only oversimplification we've been culpable of. Our creativity has been equally hampered by our various reifications. When we define "science" as "what the scientists do" and "public informing" as "what the journalists are doing" – could we inadvertently be just perpetuating the use of those 'candles'? Even implementing them in new technology? Could we be "driving into the future using only our rearview mirror", as Marshall McLuhan liked to say?

Knowledge federation

You may now understand knowledge federation as simply the prototype 'headlights' – what our society needs to be able to evolve in an informed or guided or "sustainable" or desirable or "good" way. Or as systemic innovation applied to knowledge and knowledge work.

But there's also this subtler message that the Modernity ideogram might 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 to organize its handling. To create the light bulb, we need to know that this is possible; and we need a model to guide us. You may now understand what's being introduced here more precisely – it is a complete model of 'the light bulb'. It's what we need so that we may waste no time discussing how to improve 'the candle' – when it's really the 'the light bulb' we should be talking about and aiming at.

Design epistemology

If you understand the Modernity ideogram as pointing to a need, then design epistemology is an academic way to say the same thing. We let this keyword, design epistemology, mean considering knowledge, and knowledge work, as functional parts in a larger whole. We let it mean letting the extent in which knowledge informs and completes our lives and our society determine its value – not whether it's been created as some tradition requires; or whether it fits the worldview that some tradition has bestowed on us.

Notice that the point of departure of any paradigm is a new way in which knowledge is understood and valued. Galilei was not tried for claiming that the Earth was in motion, that was just a technicality. It was his epistemology that 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. By conversing about the design epistemology, we'll be talking about the character of a possible next such change.

How we plead our case

A case for liberating and redirecting knowledge work

We now organize and present the key insights of giants – to support the ways of looking and views that have just been outlined.

The point will be the need and the possibility to 'substitute the light bulb for the candle' – of developing and using a new paradigm in knowledge work at large.

In each of the four modules by which our case is presented, we look at the main issue from a different angle, by choosing a different theme.

There will be an icon giant representing all the other giants and relevant ideas. (We emphasize that – a lot more examples are provided in those modules.) The idea is to use a journalistic technique, and present the abstract through the concrete, the general ideas through people and situation stories. Bring them down to earth, add ethos and pathos to logos.

At the same time we apply a different set of knowledge federation techniques in each of the modules. Thereby we illustrate and bootstrap knowledge federation.

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 the next disruptive change, along the lines we've just discussed.

The theme is the foundations; the epistemology, the methodology. Or more practically speaking – we here raise the question whether science – in the role of showing us the way – may be considered as "the candle" (narrowly focused light, in need of being replaced by something quite different).

The iconic giant here is Werner Heisenberg, who received the Nob prize in physics when he was barely 30 for the work he did in his 20s. He was the man to whom elder Bohr told "We know your ideas are crazy...". They were crazy enough.

So this man, looking back from an advanced stage of his life and career, writes "Physics and Philosophy", in 1958. Describes how

the nineteenth century developed an extremely rigid frame for natural science which formed not only science but also the general outlook of great masses of people.

Heisenberg then explains at length how this frame of concepts was too rigid for expressing what had traditionally been culture. How it narrowed people's ethical concerns, and ways of thinking. He then concludes:

Coming back now to the contributions of modern physics, one may say that the most important change brought about by its results consists in the dissolution of this rigid frame of concepts of the nineteenth century.

The substance of Federation through Images is to show how BOTH foundations/methodology can be rebuilt, made rigorous and academic, AND made completely broad and applicable to any question whatsoever; and with no restrictions of the view, on the contrary... The technique called "truth by convention" (for which another giant, philosopher Villard Van Orman Quine is credited) is found as the key to rebuilding the foundation. The result is polyscopy – offered here as an extension of science to this particular task, of providing vision and guidance to people. We simply adopt the positive elements of science, and use what we've learned about communication and knowledge from the sciences – and also from other traditions such as art and communication design.

The technique used for presenting the core insights of leading thinkers is 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 we've been witnessing – of information technology.

In the context of our larger vision, of an Enlightenment-like development in our own time, the analogy with the advent of the printing press is significant, because the spreading of knowledge that this technology made possible is often pointed to as one of the major contributing factors for the historical Enlightenment. Could the network-interconnected interactive digital media play a similar role today?

The We'll see (by telling the story of Douglas Engelbart, who envisioned and developed some of its most significant parts), that "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" – exactly along the lines that the Modernity ideogram is pointing to! We shall see that what we are calling systemic innovation and knowledge federation are really just the missing link in a chain of developments that were envisioned (by Engelbart, incredibly!) as early as in 1951 – but never comprehended by the Silicon Valley businesses, nor 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.

How we propose to continue

We will not solve the world's problems

Donella Meadows talked about systemic leverage points as those places within a complex system "where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything". Among the leverage points, she identified "the mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise" as the most impactful ones.

The idea is not to replace the most worthwhile efforts focused on problems, or on millennium development goals. The idea is to vastly augment the prospects of those most needed efforts to succeed.

In addition, our value proposition is to change the mood of it all. From "sustaining" to "creating". From necessity to opportunity. This does not take anything from the necessity – but it adds enthusiasm, magic...

We will not change the world

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has", wrote Margaret Mead. You'll find evidence of our thoughtfulness and commitment on these pages.

And yet it is clear to us, and should be clear to you too, that we cannot really change the world. The world is not only us – it is all of us together! It includes you too.

So if the world will indeed change, that will be a result of your doing, of your thoughtfulness and commitment!

It goes without saying that the paradigm that now so passionately wants to emerge will depend on genuine collaboration. In Norway (this website is hosted at the University of Oslo) there is a word for this – dugnad (pronounced as doognud). A typical dugnad might be organized by the people in a neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon, to gather fallen leaves and branches and do small repairs in the commons – and then share a meal together. We now need the dugnad spirit at the university. And of course also broader.

In accordance with our general strategy for social-systemic change, as made concrete in The Game-Changing Game, in the next phase of knowledge federation's evolution the veterans will be practicing what we call the back seat policy. We are 'moving to the back seat', and creating space for new people to take over the steering.