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Introducing knowledge federation
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 insights of our best minds were drowning in an ocean of glut. Vannevar Bush, a giant, saw that already seven decades 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 put together compose a whole new approach to knowledge.
And that this new approach to knowledge, just as the case was in Newton's time, naturally leads to sweeping changes in the ways in which the core issues – the creation of truth and meaning, democracy and power, technological innovation, the pursuit of happiness or wellbeing, religion... – 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.” So we built knowledge federation as a model or a prototype of a whole new way to create and use knowledge.
Knowledge federation is both a way of handling knowledge, or technically a paradigm, and an academic institution that develops it as a praxis (informed 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. And at the point in our history where we may need to depend on it more than we ever did! Considering the importance of this issue, we spared no effort in developing and describing a complete proof of concept; and setting the stage for its academic and real-life deployment and scaling.
By constructing 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 way knowledge is created and handled is brought into focus, and continuously recreated and improved.
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-level units of meaning. The meaning we assign to this keyword is similar as in political federation, where smaller units unite to achieve a shared purpose, such as greater 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. But science does that in its own peculiar way – by describing the mechanisms of nature, and explaining the observable phenomena as their consequences.
Why do we then reclaim the status of an academic field, and even of a new creative frontier, to this everyday human activity? We justify our proposal by three disruptive changes that developed during the past century:
- The emergence of fundamental insights in science in philosophy, which radically challenged the assumptions based on which our earlier ways to handle knowledge developed
- The invention and the global deployment of networked digital media, which, as we shall see, require that we reinvent also the processes and procedures by which knowledge is created and shared and applied
- The profound changes in the nature of our society and its condition – pointed to by various keywords such as "post-traditional" and "post-industrial" society, "global issues", "world problematique" and "anthropocene" – which now put new requirements on our handling of knowledge, and even make them urgent.
See
Federation through Images
In Federation through Images we trace the foundations and the techniques of a next-generation science-like development.
Federation through Stories
In Federation through Stories we trace the historical roots of a development analogous to Industrial Revolution – of a way to radically increase the effectiveness of human work.
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.