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The nature of our initiative

A historical parallel

To understand the nature of the vision that motivates 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 the scholastics discussing "how many angels can dance on a needle point"; and the iconic image of Galilei in house arrest, a century after Copernicus, whispering eppur si muove into his beard.

Observe that 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 accelerated evolution 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." The point of departure of our initiative was 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 that 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 just as the case was then, this new approach to knowledge naturally leads to sweeping changes of the ways in which core issues are understood and handled.

We thus realized that there is an approach to knowledge which

• resolves the fundamental incongruities and provides a solid and rigorous foundation for creating truth and meaning – and hence needs to be developed for fundamental or academic reasons
• gives us the people the power to use knowledge to understand and manage the complex and rapidly changing realities we have created – and hence needs to be developed for pragmatic reasons as well

It is the insight into this dual nature of the emerging approach to knowledge that compelled us to apply the best of abilities to its exploration and development.

Our strategy

“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 institution (or technically a transdiscipline) that is capable of developing this new new approach to knowledge in academic and real-life practice.

By sharing 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 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.

By sharing this model, we initiate a conversation about the ways we handle a most important resource – human creativity (or insight, ingenuity, capacity to envision and induce change...) and its fruits accumulated through the ages. We may need to depend on this resource at this point in our history more than we ever did!

What follows is a description of the knowledge federation model, and an invitation to a conversation. The purpose of the conversation will be to discuss the opportunity that our model will illuminate – and by doing that already make concerted progress toward our goal.

We rush to make this clear: When we say "conversations", we don't mean just talking. On the contrary! The idea is to develop a new way of talking in public, an orchestrated, media-enabled and growing global conversation about the themes that matter. The idea is to build a collective mind capable of thinking new thoughts, of grasping situations and finding solutions. By developing these conversations, we want to let Pierre Bourdieu and other giants be the heros of our discourse, not just Donald Trump, or some fundamentalist extremists.

We will not solve global problems

The historical moment we are living in gives impetus and vigor to what might otherwise seem like a rather classical-academic preoccupation.

In this context, the strategy we are proposing to discuss and implement, by presenting knowledge federation, is to develop an approach to contemporary issues that is complementary to the conventional approaches that focus on those issues.

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". She identified "the mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise" as the most impactful point to intervene in systems.

Our proposal is not to replace or diminish the most worthwhile efforts focused on problems, or on millennium development goals. The idea is to vastly augment the prospects of those 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 away from the necessity – but it adds enthusiasm, magic...

On a similar note, we are not implying that anything is wrong with the fine work our academic colleagues are doing. Science rose to prominence owing to its successes in dispelling age-old prejudices, by explaining the natural phenomena. That it ended up in "the Grand Revelator of modern Western culture" role was an unintended consequence of its successes, as Benjamin Lee Whorf aptly observed. Science was not conceived for the role of informing people about basic things in life. The paradigm we are proposing is incommensurable to traditional science, in Thomas Kuhn's usage of this word – it represents a different set of values and ways of looking at things, and it serves a different set of purposes. We have ample evidence to show that if our society shall have the kind of benefits that it can and must draw from the results in disciplinary academic work, then (something like) knowledge federation must be in place.

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!

Collaboration is to the new paradigm as competition is to the old one. 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 in our society.

So if you'll feel inspired by what's presented – please consider knowledge federation to be your project and not ours.

Intermission

Different thinking

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Slow thinking

The first characteristic of the new thinking is to take the time to think and digest.

Slow thinking is to "same thinking" as slow food is to fast food – it takes a bit more time, but it gives incomparably better nourishment, and digestion. And it builds the kind of relationship with (not food but) ideas, and the people who developed them, that makes it all so much more worth while.

A paradigm is a harmonious yet complex web of relationships. If you want to step into the realm of opportunities we are now opening up, if you want to look beyond our perhaps attractive but still rather cloudy visions, and into the concrete web of relationships where things become truly exciting – then you need to slow down and reflect. Give yourself time to discover. There's just no way around that. We can point to things – but it's you who'll need to look and see them.

Systemic thinking

The question immediately arises – in the busy world we live in – how can we find the time to think and digest? The answer is that we don't really need to be so busy. That being busy is, to an astonishing even breath-taking degree, a consequence of the way "the systems in which we live and work" have been structured and conceived.

So the second characteristic of (what we propose as) the remedial way to think is that it is systemic. What does that mean, practically and concretely? We've prepared this brief intuitive introduction to systemic thinking, to help you both slow down and reflect, and already get a sense of the direction we are inviting you to pursue, and of the realm of opportunities we are inviting you to develop.

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 paradigm

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. We offer it as an alternative to the approaches to knowledge where the goal is to create a single "reality picture", with which whatever is to be considered "real" or "true" must be consistent. Isn't the dictatorship of any single worldview an impediment to communication; and to evolution of ideas? In knowledge federation the ideas and their authors are allowed to preserve some of their autonomy and identity. The goal is still to unify them and make our understanding of the world coherent – but not at all cost! Sometimes good ideas just cannot be reconciled. Sometimes they represent distinct points of view, each useful in its own right.

There is a technical idea that make this approach to knowledge work: In knowledge federation all claims and models. Also the concepts or keywords we use are conceived as just ways of looking at things. We define them by making conventions, as the mathematicians do: "Let X be..." We'll explain what all this means in Federation through Images. The following example will illustrate this technique, and perhaps already make it clear.

Knowledge federation introduces itself

A taste byte of a paradigm

Think again about the emergence of science: Every new paradigm is a way of looking at the world, and a way of exploring it. Inevitably it brings with it a new set of concepts, which point to the new thinking and preoccupations it brings along. The paradigm we are about to share is not an exception.

We'll see quite a few ways to connect the dots – and the development of new ones will indeed be our goal. But here we'll immediately see a couple of them, which are really a key to it all. One is to represent the whole situation, the snapshot of it all. The dot on the "i". The other one is to define concepts by convention – ..

The intended effect will be an insight and a process – by which creativity is (1) liberated from its contemporary shackles – the institutionalized and power-related ways of doing things, and the underlying assumptions we know no longer hold; (2) directed and applied toward completely new purposes, that empower it to respond to our contemporary needs etc.

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.

So far it's saying what we said above: We are, as civilization, rushing at an accelerated speed somewhere. We don't know where. (Notice that the whole thing is not claiming that our civilization is in trouble, or not sustainable. The argument is based on something that is far more easily verified and more important – namely that we don't know! Of course some of our colleagues have done research and claim we may or may not make it. But that's not the context give in newspapers; not the reality most of us are living in, not even most of us academics! Business as usual is the reality we live in. So OBVIOUSLY our handling of information is unsuitable for choosing directions...)

Our challenge here is to depart from the commonly airy-fairy discourse about making a better future, and see if we can structure this 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.

To be concrete, you may think of candles as the way we create knowledge. Then the paradox acquires the tone of irony: "But what about the successes of science?", we imagine you might wonder. "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're about to take up.

Design epistemology

Defines the meaning and purpose and value of information and knowledge

If you understand the Modernity ideogram as pointing to a need, then design epistemology is an academic way to do the same. 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 conceived of 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 possibility of yet another such change.

Subtleties Liberation from hindrances to creativity (1) candles as institutions and institutionalized patterns of work and judgment etc. (2) reifications – that our worldview mirrors reality, and that our ways of exploring it give us access to objective reality (in sciences, media informing etc.). (3) The action 'design' here is made possible by truth by convention – or postulation or convention making. We liberate language and method - AND make it applicable in general – by building on scientific methods and insights. More about this in Federation through Images below.

Guided evolution of society

If you'll consider the movement of the bus to be our society's travel into the future, or in a word its 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.

We took this keyword over from Bela H. Banathy, who considered the guided evolution of society the theme. (We must say that he too federated this insight – in several his works and notably in "Guided evolution of society".) Banathy saw this as the second great revolution – the first one being the agricultural one (where we learned to cultivate our bio-physical environment). The next revolution will empower us to cultivate our socio-cultural environment. Here is how he framed it:

We are the first generation of our species that has the privilege, the opportunity, and the burden of responsibility to engage in the process of our own evolution. We are indeed chosen people. We now have the knowledge available to us and we have the power of human and social potential that is required to initiate a new and historical social function: conscious evolution. But we can fulfill this function only if we develop evolutionary competence by evolutionary learning and acquire the will and determination to engage in conscious evolution. These are core requirements, because what evolution did for us up to now we have to learn to do for ourselves by guiding our own evolution.

It is significant here that the bus itself is (an example of) a guiding vision. Its role is to liberate and redirect creative action. Express the gist of the paradigm... The whole thing is presently just a claim. The rest of the website plus the conversations is its justification. It takes quite a bit of work to see the details of the paradigm, the relationships, how it all fits together much better in the new way – which is what the paradigm is about.

Systemic innovation

If you'll consider the movement of the bus to be the results of our creative efforts, or of technological and other "innovation", then systemic innovation is what resolves the paradox.

There are two ways to say the same – what systemic innovation really means: (1) Innovating (or recreating) at the level of basic socio-technical systems or institutions (which you'll understand if you think of the headlights, and turning the candle into a light bulb – to adapt it to the function it has in the larger system; (2) innovating with the goal of improving the larger system or systems (which you'll see if you focus on the bus, and think that what we do with knowledge really acquires the meaning and value in this much larger context).

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.

To see why systemic innovation subsumes and yet vastly surpasses "innovation" as we normally understand this word, to see why we propose it as the rule of thumb pointing to a whole new evolutionary direction, consider the following: The dollar value of the headlights may of course be a factor to consider; 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, which move the 'bus' forward; or to our civilization as a whole; or to whatever else may be organizing our efforts and driving us forward into 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" or "public informing" as "what the journalists are doing" – could we inadvertently be just perpetuating the use of those 'candles'? And implementing them in new technology? Could we be "driving into the future using only our rearview mirror", as Marshall McLuhan liked to say?

You'll notice that systemic innovation presents an alternative – where what we innovate is not seen as the "thing" (such as an institution) that the tradition has given us, but as a function in a larger whole; and then adapted or recreated accordingly.

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 the Modernity ideogram also bears this subtler message: 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 trying to improve 'the candle' – when it's really the 'the light bulb' we should be talking about and creating together.

Systemic innovation and knowledge federation

They really so similar that – on this high level of generality where we are now speaking – they are synonymous.

They re-create one another: When knowledge federation is applied consistently, then systemic innovation follows as our next cultural renewal theme; when systemic innovation is done consistently, then knowledge federation appears as the first piece of systemic innovation to do – because it's needed to illuminate the way to all the rest; and because (unlike for ex. the financial system), it's all in our hands; we don't need to do a revolution (but the revolution in consciousness, as we shall see, can much more naturally and peacefully lead to the recreation of the financial systems, and other systems, as we shall see).

Where they differ is the background from which they spring. Knowledge federation was initiated by knowledge media researchers and developers. We realized that systemic innovation is needed if we (as civilization, or society) are to take true advantage of the technology. But systemic innovation – if it is to be done in a good, academic, meaningful way, or more simply if we should federation it – it has to spring out of the research in the systems sciences, as its extension. We'll explore this further in Federation through Stories.

A case for a new paradigm in knowledge work

How we plead our case

What we offer here is a 'view from a mountain top', or a 'view in the light of a light bulb' (created by federating knowledge) of the need and the possibility for a new paradigm in knowledge work or creative work.

Our point is that there have been three disruptive changes during the past century:

• fundamental insights have been reached in the sciences, which challenged or disproved the assumptions based on which our knowledge-related values, and practices, have developed
• new information technology enables, and as we shall see also demands that we reconsider and change the way we handle knowledge
• our civilization has reached a condition, and also a level of development or maturity, where what we need as information is entirely different than what the case was just a generation or two ago

It has indeed turned out that each of those changes have been so clear-cut and so spectacularly large in degree, that each of them alone provides more than a sufficient reason for engaging in the kind of changes that we are about to describe and propose. We highlight that by weaving together the stories and the insights of giants that represent the main milestones in the mentioned disruptive changes. We see that what's really going on in our time, and what's really worth seeing and attending to, is not Donald Trump but a sweeping Enlightenment-like change. And we already get glimpses of iconic characters and stories that might represent it, as Galilei and Newton were the icons of the previous such change.

In each of the four modules in which our case is presented, we look at our case from a different angle. You may understand them with the help of our metaphorical image, the Modernity ideogram, as showing respectively that (1) we have, and need a different principle of operation – not fire but electricity; (2) we have the technology that is needed for creating the light bulb; (3) a plan of a light bulb, together with the proof of concept – showing in what way the light bulb can be created, and what practical differences it may make; (4) the larger picture, where by looking at our civilization's evolution 'in the light of the light bulb', and the particular point in it where we now find ourselves, we see our own times and mores in a similar way as we may see the mindset of the Middle Ages – which of course makes the change immanent.

Here and also in those four modules, we use the technique that is common in journalism – which is to present a larger issue by telling a concrete story, which typically involves a giant and one of his core insights. This will give some real-life touch and zest to our stories – but it will leave you the challenge of seeing the larger picture we are pointing at by talking about concrete people and things.

In each of the four modules we apply a different set of knowledge federation techniques. In this way we also illustrate 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.

Werner Heisenberg received the Nobel prize for developing the quantum mechanics when he was barely 30 years old. Looking back from an advanced stage of his life and career, in his 1958 "Physics and Philosophy", Heisenberg explained 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.

He then pointed out how this frame of concepts was too narrow and too rigid for expressing some of the core elements of human culture – which as a result appeared to modern people as irrelevant. And how correspondingly limited and utilitarian values and worldviews became prominent. Heisenberg then explained how modern physics disproved this "narrow frame"; and concluded that

one may say that the most important change brought about by &#91 the results of modern physics &#93 consists in the dissolution of this rigid frame of concepts of the nineteenth century.

The substance of Federation through Images is to show how the fundamental insights reached in 20th century science and philosophy allow us to develop a way out of "the rigid frame" – which is a rigorously founded methodology for creating truth and meaning about any issue and at any level of generality, which we are calling polyscopy. In essence, polyscopy is just a generalization of the scientific approach to knowledge, based on recent scientific / philosophical insights, which amounts to is something akin to "scientific method" for knowledge federation.

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

You might be feeling that the metaphor of the candle headlights surely must fail when we talk about the information technology. Aren't we living in the Age of Information? Isn't our information technology indeed the most modern part of our civilization, the one where the largest progress has been made, the one that best characterizes our progress? In Federation through Stories we explain why this is not the case, why the candle headlights analogy works in this key domain as well – by telling the story of the man who conceived, developed and prototyped the core elements of the new media technology that is now in common use.

Digital technology could help make this a better world. But we've also got to change our way of thinking.

The details are provided in Federation through Stories, so we'll here only give you a hint. The printing press analogy works, because the printing press was to a large degree the technical invention that led to the Enlightenment, by making knowledge widely accessible. The question is – What might be an analogous development today? And of course the "network-interconnected interactive digital media" is the answer. But there's a catch! When we apply the Industrial Age efficiency scheme – and use the Web to merely broadcast knowledge, augment the volume, reduce the price... then the result is of course information glut. We end up "drowning in information", as Neil Postman observed! As the Incredible History of Doug will show, this technology was conceived (in 1951!) to serve as a societal "nervous system", enabling an entirely different division, specialization and organization of knowledge work (which is of course knowledge federation by definition).

To see the difference, imagine what would your mind be like if your cells were using your nervous systems to merely broadcast data!. I'd hate to tell you how this reflects upon our society, on our "collective intelligence"...

It follows that to draw real benefits from information technology, systemic innovation must replace the conventional reliance on the market. And conversely – that the contemporary information technology has been conceived as an enabler for systemic innovation. The potential benefits of which cannot be overrated...

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 the theme is knowledge federation and systemic innovation as creative frontier. Here we present a (sufficiently) complete prototype of the (socio-technical) 'light bulb' – together with the proof of concept, showing "it works" – and look what we'll be able to see when its light's been turned on!