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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 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, 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 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).
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 on 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 its federation 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 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 as we the people need it – 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.
Introducing systemic innovation
Revisioning modernity
While you'll find on these pages a variety of insights and principles that knowledge federation has produced, right away we'll introduce you to a single such pair that we've found especially important. We offer it as a rule of thumb pointing to a better way to be creative. And 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 – the way we look at the world!
"Nonsense! Preposterous!" we imagine you exclaim. "What about the advances of science? What with all the new information technology? Aren't we living in the Age of Information? Isn't our handling of information what we've most successfully modernized?"
If this is your first reaction, then we are at a successful start of a good conversation. It is far too early to draw conclusions. It will serve us best if you'll consider the Modernity ideogram as an invitation to stop and think. If you'll use it as the Zen koan has been used – to disrupt your habitual responses, and make yourself open to new ways to see. If you'll manage to do that, you'll find that the bus with candle headlights has a multiplicity of interpretations. You'll be discovering new nuances of meaning as we go along.
- To be continued...