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(Margaret Mead, Continuities in Cultural Evolution, 1964)

I am proposing a practical way to correct a fundamental error.

Problems—including unsustainabilities in global trends and discontinuities in cultural evolution—need to be seen and treated as consequences of that error.

I am proposing to institute a transdiscipline.

Which is a new kind of institution. And I make this proposal concrete by offering knowledge federation as a complete prototype of the transdiscipline; ready to be examined and put to use.

In his 1969 MIT report and call to action—to institute transdisciplinarity by anchoring it academically, as the necessary first step toward empowering us, post-traditional and post-industrial humans, to unravel of our new problems and begin a new phase of societal-and-cultural evolution—Erich Jantsch quoted Norbert Wiener, the iconic progenitor of cybernetics:

“There is only one quality more important than ‘know-how’…… This is ‘know-what’ by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.”

Academic disciplines cannot provide us know-what; and the media informing, such as it is, won't do it either. A system that can empower us to act knowledge-based must combine disciplinary and other evidence; it must transcend academic and cultural fragmentation; it must communicate to the public with authority of science—in ways that are well beyond the modalities of outreach that the sciences have been able to produce.

This website is intended to complement my book called Liberation, which will soon be in print—and outline a vision of a possible future that is in significant dimensions better than our present. The Liberation book will render the requisite evidence as brief and entertaining real-life people-and-situation stories called vignettes; and ignite an initiative, also called holotopia, whose aim is to ignite and enable comprehensive change—of our social and cultural order of things as a whole. Here my aim is to set in motion a parallel academic initiative; by submitting an academic case for it to begin with.

On these pages I will share my case for transdisciplinarity, or knowledge federation, by outlining its structure; and I'll let you reconstruct its details by browsing through the book and participating in the public dialog the book will ignite. Don't be fooled by my unacademic manner of speaking; I have my reasons for doing this. You'll have comprehended me correctly when you see that both the inevitability and the details of knowledge federation follow from a single simple principle called knowledge federation axiom; which states that knowledge must be federated; which means that we can only say that we know something when due evidence has been accounted for; and that we can only say that something is known when it's reflected in everyday awareness and action; and that the knowledge federation axiom is not assumed to be true but stated as a convention of language and my definition of knowledge. And you'll have comprehended me completely when you see that what all this comes down to is the academic core value—to build on what's academically reported instead of ignoring it; or in other words—that the knowledge federation proposal is as academically sound as a call to reform academic work and information at large needs to be.

The knowledge federation prototype is a result of devoted labor of some excellent people. In the Liberation book I explained that I worked for nearly three decades (supported by a tenured academic position with uncommonly much freedom) with constellations of collaborators who were often creative leaders in their fields. The reason why I don't say "we" as I do in the book, but address you in first person, is that I want to make a clear and strong statement; and be personally accountable for what I say.

Historical attempts to institute transdisciplinarity remained ignored.

And when we took over the torch—or as the case may be this large boulder and began rolling it uphill—the same dynamic repeated itself. I'll invite you to break the spell of ignoring; and see instituting transdisciplinarity as our generation's and hence also your personal project and duty; and to act, incisively and without delay—because we have no more time to lose.

To make a case for transdisciplinarity I will demonstrate that our know-what and more generally our ideas about life's important or pivotal themes have as much room for improvement as the comprehension of natural phenomena did before science; and that the nature of our information is such that knowledge is impossible; and that all this is due to a fundamental error that has been diagnosed by creative leaders in science and philosophy; and that correcting this error will open up a vast and magnificent creative frontier—where the next-generation academics will be empowered to be creative in ways and degrees that their situation will necessitate; and do as the founders of scientific revolution did in their day—and recreate the way they do science; and reconceive how we all handle information and pursue knowledge.

In the remaining four main pages of this website I'll let knowledge federation speak for itself; and thereby also illustrate some of its techniques.

• Federation through Ideograms will explain the nature of the error I've been telling you about, and how I propose to correct it
• Federation through Keywords will help you comprehend both precisely
• Federation through Prototypes will illustrate knowledge federation by a few examples of application
• Federation through Action will make it clear exactly how I propose to go about correcting the error; and invite you to take part.

Dino Karabeg