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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... Bring to mind the iconic image of Galilei in house arrest, a century after Copernicus, whispering eppur si muove into his beard. And the similarly iconic scholastic discussions, about "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, 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 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! Being aware that the liberation of our creativity from age-old beliefs and habitual patterns and power interests is due also for fundamental or academic reasons, we spared no effort in developing and describing an up-to-date 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, and more generally the way our creative efforts are directed, 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.
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 we need – 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. Our vision is of an informed post-traditional or post-industrial society – where the co-creation and integration and application of such knowledge is recognized as our quintessential creative task.
Introducing systemic innovation
Revisioning modernity
While on these pages you'll find a variety of examples – of guiding insights, principles, rules of thumb that knowledge federation has produced, right away we'll introduce you to a single such example, which motivates our very 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, and the way we see it!
"Nonsense! Preposterous!" we imagine you exclaim. "What about the successes 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. Recall that our goal is not any fixed conception of how the things are, but a creative dance of new ways of looking at things, so that they inform one another. Indeed, it is with the liberation from our age-old fixed conceptions and conceptualization that our co-creation of the new paradigm must begin. So consider this bus with candle headlights simply as what it is – just another way of looking at things. We've constructed it to show you something. If you use it in the way it's intended to be used, as one would use a pair of binoculars, it will help you see more, and see relationships and persisting patterns in things. You'll be discovering new nuances of meaning of this metaphor as we go along.
We'll come back to the questions about science and information technology and answer them carefully, by putting to good use some of the best insights of our giants. But let's first just become acquainted with it, and discover some of its more obvious meanings, by looking through it at the world we see around us.
We'll at the same time use this opportunity to define some of our keywords. We'll take advantage of the Modernity ideogram to explain what exactly we mean by knowledge federation; and to create some other keywords that will enable us to pint in clear terms to a way in which our creative capabilities may need to be more productively directed.
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 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 "the value proposition" that systemic innovation has in store for us. 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'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 systemic innovation applied to knowledge and knowledge work.
And there's also this subtler message that the Modernity ideogram may 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. You may now understand our value proposition more precisely – it is to provide a complete model of the light bulb; so that we may waste no time trying to improve 'the candle', when it's the 'the light bulb' we should be talking about and aiming at.
Knowledge federation and systemic innovation are so close in meaning, that at this high level of generality where we are presently talking 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 the rational way to be creative (as Erich Jantsch observed a half-century ago). And when systemic innovation is applied to our work with knowledge and information, then knowledge federation is what results. Like the Yin and the Yang in Oriental cosmologies, knowledge federation and systemic innovation are two alternative principles and ways of working that continuously re-create one another.
Guided evolution of society
This keyword, the guided evolution of society, may now be understood as simply what results – as daily choices, and as societal evolution – when knowledge federation and systemic innovation are put to use. This is where the real difference is to be made! The goal of knowledge federation is of course to dispel oversimplifications and misdirections in all walks of life; and enable systemic innovation to step in and create improvements. Ample evidence, and a broad variety of applications, will be shared on these pages. But as a warmup, and to make the concepts clear, let's just zoom in on some common-sense observations.
Consider "the pursuit of happiness", for example – by which, needless to say, the course of modernity has largely been directed. Let's use white sugar as a metaphor, to point to a more general pattern. Let's say that the nature created the pleasant taste of sugar for some systemic guiding role (you may assume that chewing complex carbohydrates creates sugars already in the mouth, which both taste well and provide nutrition). But our industries can extract the pleasantly tasting substance from the nourishing rest. One can now enjoy the pleasant taste without chewing. Attractive taste can be given to virtually any substance!
Or think about the sensation of interest, the feeling that something is "interesting". Interest too has a systemic role. Interest too is a resource. How are we using it? Interest motivates our children to explore the world; it compels them to learn. But our industries can create games that are only interesting; and that keep our children away from exploring the world, and from learning.
The movement of the bus, representing our ride into the future, is really our civilization's evolution – which is of course not only technological, but just as well and most importantly also social-systemic and cultural and ethical. We have largely abandoned this evolution to commercial and superficial interests. We use the keyword guided evolution of society to point to the alternative. And to the differences that suitable information could make. Think again of the advent of the Enlightenment. Think of all the prejudices dispelled. Could the evolution of society we've experienced only be a prelude, and an experiment? Will a evolutionary re-direction result if we just put the right knowledge to right use?
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 – the 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 some tradition requires; or whether it fits the worldview that the tradition has bestowed.
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.