(Alexander Laszlo, motto of the 57th yearly conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences in Haiphong, Vietnam, in 2013)

When we connect the dots—and what I've shared so far may already be all you really need to be able to see this—we come to a realization that is the pivotal point of it all:

We will not solve our problems by living and working within the systems we used when we created them.

And—in spite of the nature of our information, which makes it impossible to connect the dots—this realization is already reaching out to us from the collective unconscious; because some people had the rare fortune to be born on the right side of the road, so to speak; Alexander Laszlo—my friend and knowledge federation colleague and veteran—for instance. His father Ervin is a premier systems scientist and The Club of Rome veteran; who—having seen that the technical direction The Club had taken would not be enough—initiated The Club of Budapest as its update, to work on the cultural or ethical or "spiritual" side of "the world problematique"; who was the editor of The International Liberary of Systems Theory and Philosophy, where Erich Jantsch published some of his pivotal works. Alexander's Ph.D. thesis advisor was Hasan Özbekhan, who wrote a 150-page theory of systemic innovation while working within Erich Jantsch's 1968 action team; and also The Club of Rome's original statement of purpose "The Predicament of Mankind". Alexander also collaborated closely with Béla H. Bánáthy, and contributed to both of his volumes about the dialog. It is therefore no wonder that—as the President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences—Alexander initiated a self-organization in this academic community! And isn't this exactly what Doug Engelbart was urging us to do? A salient point, which makes me so eager to tell this story, was that the 57th ISSS yearly conference in Haiphong, Vietnam, which Alexander organized, where this self-organization was unfolding (and where Alexander and I met for the first time physically)—took place less than two seeks after Engelbart died in 2013, feeling that he had failed! In Haiphong, "collective intelligence" and Engelbart's name were on everyone's lips. I let Alexander—in this perhaps all too minimal sketch of the knowledge federation prototype—illustrate and represent its most valuable and most important—the knowledge federation community of elders. And add right away that our sole aim—at this stage of development—is to empower the next-generation scientists or academics to take up this pivotal line of work.

With what I've just told you accompanies a sobering realization, which is staring us in the eye: That there is nobody out there who's reading our academic publications, who's ready to implement our proposals, and put them into action.

We are 'the candle'.

We have to self-organize differently—if the creative power and information and knowledge that exist in the academic system is to have the sort of impact it must have in this pivotal moment of human history. To correct the error that is the theme of this proposal—the action with which any serious attempt to make a difference that makes a difference must begin—it is not sufficient to connect only the document dots; the human dots too need to be connected—so that we may self-organize differently; so that we may be the systems capable of making the difference that must be made.

To empower our next generation to see the systems and be the systems is the duty we have as (academic) generation.

“The tie between information and action has been severed", Neil Postman warned in his 1990 keynote "Informing Ourselves to Death" to German computer scientists; "we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don’t know what to do with it." Postman's call to action was to see the information technology, and their work, in a larger humanistic perspective; to see it in a larger picture; because as the things are now—the creators of the world's most powerful technology give it to commercial actors, to power structure; and it remains to social scientists to only diagnose the problems as they develop.

Knowledge federation restores the severed tie between information and action by creating prototypes.

Prototypes are the characteristics products of knowledge federation—as academic books and articles are the characteristic products of the traditional academic work. When we see ourselves as (parts of) society's 'headlights'—we are empowered to self-organize differently, as this all-important pivotal function requires.

A prototype is

• a model, functioning in reality, exhibiting a collection of challenge–solution pairs, or design patterns as we are calling them; and showing how to combine those design patterns in a coherently functioning whole
• an intervention, strategically designed to alter certain conventional practice or system
• an experiment, showing what in the proposed design works well, and what needs to be improved.

A prototype is not complete unless it has a clear and realistic impact model and a deployment plan.

In knowledge

I offer knowledge federation as (a prototype of) the academia's and the society's missing evolutionary organ; and as the strategically first system our self-organization or bootstrapping efforts need to be focused on; which will organize us and empower us—and importantly, our next generation—to foster both the guiding-light knowledge and the systemic innovation as praxis.

Knowledge federation was created in 2008, at the Inter University Center Dubrovnik, by a small group of knowledge media researchers and developers; who had realized that our work had matured to the point where we were creating (no longer only enabling technology, but also) systems that were "collectively intelligent" and have other desirable properties too. We readily saw that the technology that we and our colleagues were developing had the potential to revolutionize systems; and that to realize this potential—we would need to self-organize differently. At second, biennial workshop at the IUC Dubrovnik, in 2010, whose title was "Self-Organizing Collective Mind", we invited a couple of dozen hand-picked experts who would together represent the suitable and sufficiently complete mix of expertise; and we invited them to self-organize and form a transdiscipline.

At our first international workshop, at Stanford University in 2011, within the Triple Helix IX international conference, and in our contributed article, we announced systemic innovation as an emerging and necessary trend in innovation; and (the systemic structure prototyped by) knowledge federation as its systemic enabler.

Here is how we work: A prototype of a system is created, and a transdiscipline around it—to update it and give it real-life impact; according to the state-of-the-art disciplinary and other insights that everyone brings along. Knowledge federation creates the transdiscipline by creating itself.

Today the knowledge federation prototype is a complete prototype of the transdiscipline conceived in terms of about forty smaller prototypes; which models new ways to implement all those various parts and functions that constitute a discipline—ranging from epistemology and methodology to a community of state-of-the-art experts and examples of application.

Our public informing prototype showed how to restore vision to democracy.

In information

You must have notice that I deliberately spare of you of links; I want us to be on the same page and reflect; and suspend the habit of clicking. The reason why I'll introduce to you our public informing prototype (which we created as our very first, not including the knowledge federation prototype itself, of course, in Barcelona in 2011) by asking you to see (at least the first 22 minutes of ) the video recording of Doug Engelbart's keynote speech at the Innovation Journalism (a catch-all term which encompasses both journalism that reports on innovation and innovation of journalism) community's fourth conference (at Stanford University in 2007), is not only that it will put the ball in play by motivating our project—but also because it will give you a 22-minute insider's view of the Silicon Valley's and IT innovation's history, which is still largely ignored; and most importantly, also an insider's view of the IT innovation's future—which is still universally ignored. In the video you'll first see John Markoff (who wrote one of Doug's biographies) introduce Doug; by first excusing himself for saying what everyone in the room knows—namely that while innovation is as a rule incremental, as most activity in The Valley has been, "once in a great while there are innovations that change entire paradigms, they create new industries and they ultimately transform societies. Doug's work, beginning in the 1950s, falls into that category." After Markoff's five-minute introduction, all in this style, Doug used fifteen or so minutes to deliver a clear and strong point of it all; which he introduced by first saying upfront (don't miss this part!) that the motivations and perceptions that drove him along "all these years" were "large-scale and very conceptual"; and how it all began when he pondered the question "How can I turn my life's career into something that would be most meaningful to mankind?" And after three months of intense reflection concluded that humanity's problems were becoming increasingly more urgent and more complex; and that the only way we can comprehend and handle them is if we do that collectively; and so agumenting our collective capability to deal with complex and urgent problems became his life-long purpose and pursuit. (This was a very brief and public version of Engelbart's story; in a bit longer and more private version you would hear that he had a proper epiphany.. exactly as Tesla did in that park in Budapest, when he saw his induction motor with rotating magnetic field). The five minutes that follow will give you a mountain top view of a uniquely productive life-and-career; and prepare you for Doug's introduction of his main point (how to make innovation, and IT innovation in particular, be most meaningful to mankind): When you hear Doug say the word "augment" or "augmentation", be aware that those are his technical keywords; which refer to his own authentic and ingenious systemic innovation methodology; which he published in a SRI report in 1962 (six years before Jantsch and others would meet in Bellagio for that purpose); which subsequently guided Eoug throughout his long and productive life and career (and led, among other things, to "the personal computing and the Internet", as Markoff pointed out); which, in a nutshell, consists in looking at the "tool system" (or technology) on the one side, and "human system" on the other (which includes the technology-enabled social processes and systems), and at the "capability infrastructure" or "capability hierarchy" in their midst, and asking—what are the important or key or pivotal capabilities that we before all can and need to "augment". In the next breath Doug will point in the direction we've been talking about all along—and that will be his call to action: Journalism's interpretive function; to turn the multitude of incoming impressions into useful or functional streams of meaning. You may now enjoy the Engelbart show.

As in all our prototypes, this one too has quite a few design patterns that are artfully woven together; so let me here zoom in on one—the one Doug was pointing to; the public informing's key role in our collective mind—of turning the view of things happening out there into high-level comprehension and action. Our public informing prototype we envisioned as two loops forming the number 8 (Mei Lin visualized them as butterfly's two wings, which enables the whole thing, and us, to 'fly'): The lower loop you may imagine as representing the material world and its events or as raw (yet meaningfully and conscientiously directed) perception; the upper loop you may imagine as comprehension and ideation—including, importantly, the all-important know-what; what do we the people need to do to truly take care of what we perceive as bothersome (or importantly—what we do not yet perceive as bothersome, but may be very much so in the future). In the concrete Barcelona prototype the people are empowered to do take part in the lower loop directly; we built this prototype on the pre-existing Barcelona's WikiDiario citizen journalism project. No less important was to include academic and other experts in the upper loop—so that underlying deeper or systemic causes and remedies to problems don't remain on academic bookshelves, but have a way to impact public comprehension and action; How else shall we the people ever jointly know, I explained in the Liberation book, that for instance "corporate personhood" might be an issue? Here (in the upper loop), knowledge federation's daringly innovative and artistically inspired expert communication design team their systemic solutions.

Our Barcelona prototype prototyped also a system by which a functional public informing could be created and perpetually re-created.

We were fortunate to have with us Paddy Coulter (fellow of Green College Oxford and director of Oxford Global Media; formerly the director of Oxford University Reuters School of Journalism and premier British journalist); who had also been a keynoter at our formative 2010 workshop in Dubrovnik. In the manner of giving the good journalism tradition the reigns, we asked Paddy to chair the Barcelona event.

We techies should not allow ourselves to reinvent journalism.

Our task was to facilitate its evolution—by federating transformative memes. In Barcelona workshop Mei Lin Fung (founder of the Silicon Valley-based initiative to continue and complete Doug Engelbart's vision called Program for the Future) represented the Doug Engelbart legacy; David Price (co-founder of Debategraph, which is the leading collective mind initiative, and of Global Sensemaking, the global community of collective mind researchers and developers) led the technology team.

The game-changing game prototype showed how to empower young people to make a difference.

In empowerment

As an experiment, the prototype we crafted in Barcelona gave us an invaluable insight: When the journalists who co-created it with us returned to their busy editorial desks—they were out of sight! This helped us realize that the people who have power positions within a system will not be the one who can change that system; they are too busy running it!

A system that can change systems must be conceived differently!

And so the following year, at our 2012 Palo Alto workshop, we crafted a prototype of a system called the game-changing game; and presented it at the Bay Area Future Salon.

The game-changing game is not a game in ordinary sense, but a game-changing way to have a career; where instead of playing by the rules, instead of trying to fit in an existing profession or system—the players undertake to change a system. This initial prototype did have something akin to a game board, available online on DebateGraph; where the players would first be offered a spectrum of (personal and career) Goals (some of which are listed on the above figure); and then brought to the Game Start, from where one could either go to the Vision Quest or the Action Quest. The Vision Quest offered an explanation why the chosen goal—and each of the proposed goals—can indeed be achieved through systemic innovation; the Action Quest offered a medium by which the players could self-organize and create systemic innovation initiatives.

The game-changing game has two categories of players: The A-players (who as graduate students, or entrepreneurs in search of a project) are in a career and life phase where change is natural and easy; and the Z-players (who as professors, or investors) are in positions of power.

The Z-players play the game-changing game by empowering the A-players to pursue their career goals by changing a system.

I published a description of this prototype in the proceedings of The European Academy of Design's yearly conference; which had "Crafting the Future" as title; my contribution had the title "The Game-Changing Game—a practical way to craft the future". Its point being that the natural and arguably only way to "craft the future" was by empowering our next generation to craft the systems in which they'll live and work.

In 2012 in Zagreb we created The Club of Zagreb—a redesign of The Club of Rome based on the game-changing game; the point of which was similar.

Collaborology prototype showed how education can be turned into an instrument of change.

In education

A natural way to change course is by changing education.

Education recreates the world with every new generation; unless education is conceived in the traditional way—namely as a way to socialize or condition our next generation to fit in "the world" as is.

The collaborology prototype models the education we now need.

By weaving together about half a dozen of transformative design patterns; of which I'll right away highlight this all-important one:

In the collaborology prototype education is by pull, not push.

Which means that the student learns by following his own personal interests and goals—and learning trajectory; and translates into a whole spectrum of advantages, some of which are obvious.

The collaborology prototype is a result of almost two decades of evolution; most of which was through an earlier prototype of a transdisciplinary course called Information Design; which we were evolving and teaching at the University of Oslo; which in its developed form had about 100 students. The description of this course model and the enabling technical solutions were discussed and published in suitable international conferences and journals.

Both the collaborology course and its predecessor have been conceived as a design lab; where the students self-organize in small teams, and create the learning resources for the next-generation students; which has a number of additional advantages—including the hands-on instruction in collaborative creation for common good (instead of studying and competing for grades).

The collaborology course is, in addition, internationally federated.

Whereby the course becomes, in effect, the game-changing game—where international instructors act as Z-players, empowering teams of A-players to be creative in ways that are well beyond what the traditional education offers; including co-creation of systems.

By enabling each instructor to focus on a single module and corresponding learning resources, and to create them through collaboration with international students including communication designers and media professionals—the collaborology prototype manifests the economies of scale and related advantages that are characteristic of systemic innovation.

The collaborology prototype models a feasible or "sustainable" way to develop and disseminate a transdisciplinary body of knowledge about any theme.

I presented and discussed the collaborology prototype at the conference Future Education, which the World Academy of Art and Science organized in 2017 in Rome; in the session titled "Transition to a New Paradigm in Education", and the article titled "Systemic Innovation in Education – the Collaborology Prototype". I explained in the abstract:

"Already a half-century ago visionary thinkers observed that the global issues point to a key capability our civilization is lacking – to innovate on the scale of basic institutions and other systems. Think of systemic innovation as updating the gigantic socio-technical ‘machinery’ whose function is to take everyone’s daily work as input and produce socially and environmentally useful effects as output. Consider it the feedback-and-control needed to give our civilization a viable evolutionary course; the flexibility our institutions need to be able to transform under pressure, and not break down. The Collaborology prototype is an intervention to foster the systemic innovation capability through education.