How to give knowledge power?

How can we give knowledge real-life impact? How can we change real-life systems? How can we create institutions that are capable of evolving to reflect the present state of our knowledge, and our needs?

We create prototypes – real-life systems embedded in reality, acting upon reality and aiming to change it. The prototypes serve as

• models – because they embody design ideas and solutions in a manner that makes them applicable and adaptable to other situations
• experiments – because being embedded in reality they allow us to see what works and what doesn't
• em>interventions</em> – strategically deployed to transform systems, and to point to a new direction
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By putting a prototype in charge of a transdisciplinary community, to update it continuously, the prototypes are at the same time conceived as a core tool of knowledge federation.

We should also emphasize that the list we are providing is incomplete – our aim is to provide illustrations and highlights, not a complete directory.

We are developing a domain map

While waiting for our domain map to be completed (it is currently a theme of a research project) we list our prototypes linearly, beginning from the more technical or "hard", and ending with the most conceptual or "soft". (A domain map is one of the key tools of knowledge federation, a variant of Engelbart's DKR (or "dynamic knowledge repository"). The idea is that a community in charge of a domain should display its domain using a system of maps, that (similarly as the geographical maps) reflect distinct purposes, levels of detail etc.

Knowledge media

By "knowledge media" we mean tools and processes that enable knowledge federation. Knowledge Federation originated as a community of knowledge media researchers and developers, as a place where we can exchange ideas and team up with other people and communities for real-world impact.

Meme Media and Webbles. How to best take advantage of the Web's potential to generate new knowledge by combining the old? The Meme Media and the Webbles are both a methodology and a toolkit. They have been developed at the Knowledge Media Laboratory at the University of Hokkaido, Japan, under the leadership of Professor Yuzuru Tanaka. Professor Tanaka was first to use the term "knowledge federation" in the way in which we are using it. See

• Webble World Portal
• M. Kuwahara and Y. Tanaka: Webbles: Programmable and Customizable Meme Media Objects in a Knowledge Federation Framework Environment on the Web Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Knowledge Federation, CEUR-WS, Vol. 822, Dubrovnik, 2010.

Debategraph. How to enable a global community of interest to organize together the documents and points of view relevant to their domain – and reach insights and conclusions? Developed by ..See

• Debategraph's introduction to itself]

Knowledge Gardening and TopicQuests. Engelbart's core idea (what he called CoDIAK and what we are calling the collective mind) is that when people are able to directly interact with the computers, and when the computers are linked into a network, then the people around the globe can think and work together in entirely new ways, well beyond even what sitting in the same room could make possible (he developed the familiar technology to enable that development). Building on Doug's idea of the DKR, the Knowledge Gardening and TopicQuests are again a combination of a suitable methodology and enabling set of technologies.See

• Article
• [TQPortal|A technical overview of TopicQuests]