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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, 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 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 motivates our initiative. 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.
We use different keywords to point to those nuances of meaning.
Systemic innovation
We practice systemic innovation when our primary objective 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.
The dollar value of the headlights is 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 of our technology taken together, to the results of our daily work, to our civilization as a whole, and 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 keep in mind as "our value proposition". We'll see again and again systemic innovation make such a difference in value, wherever it's applied.
But looking at the world through the dollar value is not the only oversimplification we have been culpable of. Our creativity has been equally confined and misdirected by our various reifications. When we consider "science" to be "what the scientists are doing"; and "public informing" as "what the journalists are doing" – aren't we restricting what we can do at the universities and at the media agencies to perpetual reproduction of our 'candles'? And aren't we likewise restricting what we can do with information technology? And the way the people are informed, and what they are able to conceive of and do?
Guided evolution of society
On a closer look, we'll find similar oversimplifications and misdirections in all walks of life.
Consider "the pursuit of happiness" – by which, needless to say, modernity, and hence also our creativity, tend to be directed. Consider the white sugar as an example and a metaphor. Suppose that the pleasant taste of sugar is there for a reason (you may assume that chewing complex carbohydrates creates sugars in our mouth, which both taste well and nourish our bodies). But our industries can extract the pleasantly tasting substance from the nourishing whole. They can then use it to give virtually any substance an attractive taste. What price do we pay in the long run – nobody can tell...
Or think about the interest of our children; this too exists in the larger scheme of things for a purpose – it motivates them to explore the world, it compels them to learn. But our industries can create games that are only interesting; and that keep kids away from learning, or even worse – that have a negative educational effect.
The movement of the bus, representing our ride into the future, is really just our evolution – which is not only technological, but as well societal and cultural, and ethical. We use the keyword guided evolution of society to point to the differences that suitable information could make. Think again of the advent of the Enlightenment. Think of the prejudices it dispelled. Consider how it accelerated our evolution. Could all this be only a prelude?
Knowledge federation
You may now understand knowledge federation as simply systemic innovation applied to knowledge and knowledge work. And as the creation and use of knowledge that we the people may now need as evolutionary guidance.
Imagine if a new turn in our evolution could be begun by an enlightened approach – to knowledge itself; where knowledge and knowledge work are themselves liberated from prejudices, and created and used in ways that serve us incomparably better than the current ones do.
Imagine good knowledge permeating our lives. Imagine our values, lifestyles, habitual responses... becoming as different as the world we inhabit is different from the world where Galilei was imprisoned.
We have given this name to the quest for (or technically a prototype of) more suitable 'headlights'. Knowledge federation is also the name of a prototype institution (technically the transdiscipline), which is capable of orchestrate this quest.
Relevant here is 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 organize its handling. To create the light bulb, we need a new set of principles; we need a model; we need a realistic way to replace our candles with light bulbs, in practical reality. The purpose of these pages is to provide exactly the guiding light that is needed – so that we may waste no more time trying to improve those 'candles', when it's the 'light bulbs' we really need, and want.
Knowledge federation and systemic innovation are so close in meaning, that at the high level of generality where we are now they may well be considered synonymous. When we do knowledge federation right, when we "stand on the shoulders of giants", then systemic innovation is seen as just an informed or effective or safe or (as Erich Jantsch wrote, from whom we've adopted this keyword) rational way to be creative. And when systemic innovation is applied to our work with knowledge and information, the knowledge federation is the result.
Like the Yin and the Yang in Oriental cosmologies, knowledge federation and systemic innovation are two alternative principles and ways of working that continuously recreate one another.
Design epistemology
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 technical detail. His epistemology was what 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. Can you imagine the next such change, taking place in our own time?
We let the keyword design epistemology point to such a possibility. We let it mean considering knowledge, and knowledge work, as functional parts in a larger whole. We let it mean that we'll let the extent in which knowledge informs and completes our lives and our society determine its value – and not whether it's been created as the tradition requires; or whether it fits the worldview that the tradition has bestowed on us.
See
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.
We render the gist of our initiative, as well as core insights of leading thinkers, as 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. 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.