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

If you've followed me this far—or rather this high up the metaphorical mountain—then you've comprehended that it's a change of self-perception and self-identity that I've been guiding you to; and that the all-important next step, the step that takes us into the emerging paradigm and from problems to solutions—is through the metaphorical mirror; by which (having seen ourselves in the world, and comprehended that we are not its "objective observers" but its inextricable part and accountable for it) we become empowered to turn information into action; and importantly—into systemic change. And that's exactly bootstrapping that Doug Engelbart was urging us to engage in; and that's also what prototypes are about. A prototype is a new kind of academic result—which is not telling us how the world is, but designed to be part of the world and interacting with it, in order to make real difference.

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.

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.

Before I tell you about the knowledge federation prototype, and how we self-organized to become capable of creating prototypes, and before I share some examples of pivotal prototypes we've produced—let me take a moment and introduce a human prototype. I'll tell you why: That all-important first step, through the mirror, has proven to be insurmountably difficult even for the best of us. To be "objective observer", to stay put in whatever systems we've inherited, is so much part of our cultural and especially academic DNA that it takes a veritable leap of faith to pull oneself out of it (perhaps the metaphor of unswamping oneself by pulling one's bootstraps has profounder connotations than even Doug realized).

It is therefore of utmost importance that some academic people have been able to engage in academic bootstrapping; Alexander Laszlo—my friend and knowledge federation colleague and veteran—for instance; who as the President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, at this society's 57th yearly conference in Haiphont, Vietnam, initiated a self-organization toward "collective intelligence" in this academic community! A salient point (to me who collects people stories, and uses them as breadcrumbs to mark the way to the emerging paradigm) was that the event he organized 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.

Why was it possible for Alexander to do what so many of our academic colleagues have been unable to? Alexander had the rare fortune to be born on the right side of the street, so to speak; his father Ervin observed—already in the title of one of his many books—that our choice is "evolution or extinction", and made Alexander's choice easy. Ervin, who is now 91 years old, is a premier systems scientist and The Club of Rome veteran; who—having seen that the technical direction The Club had taken would not reach far enough—initiated The Club of Budapest as its update; to work on the cultural or ethical or "spiritual" side of "the world problematique"; Ervin Laszlo 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 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.

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 our 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 a sufficiently complete combination of expertise; and we invited them to self-organize and form a transdiscipline together.

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 may have noticed that I deliberately spare of you of links; I want us to be on the same page, and reflect together. The reason why I'll now share the link to 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 that it's a perfect way to introduce and motivating the public informing prototype we crafted in Barcelona in 2011; and to give you an opportunity to witness how a huge elephant can be in the room can and remain invisible. This vide will also 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, an insider's view of the IT innovation's future—which is universally ignored. In the video you'll first see John Markoff (The New York Times technology columnist, who authored a biography of Engelbart) introduce Doug; by first excusing himself for saying what everyone in the room knew—namely that while innovation is as a rule incremental, and Silicon Valley innovation is no exception, "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, Doug used fifteen or so minutes to deliver a clear and strong point of it all. I tested this talk on Noah; and he too didn't get it (even though he's well-versed in systemic innovation, and quite capable of connecting the dots. So I feel you too may need some translation, before you look at this video. I am not condescending: I had a chance to not only break bread with Engelbart and the circle of friends and collaborators around him—but to also teach a PhD course at the University of Oslo about Doug's ideas and legacy; so I can say that I had the rare fortune to study him thoroughly.

Notice, as a warmup, that Doug opens his talk by saying that the motivations and perceptions that drove him along "all these years" were "large-scale and very conceptual"; isn't this the "different" way to use the mind you and I have been talking about all along?

Then you'll hear how it all began; how Doug pondered the big and basic general question "How can I turn my life's career into something that would be most meaningful to mankind?" And how he, after three months of intense reflection, concluded that humanity's problems were rapidly becoming more urgent and complex; and that we'll only be able to comprehend and handle them if we do that collectively; so that "augmenting" 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).

When you hear Doug share the thought experiment, where everyone in the room and the room itself grows ten times in size (and concluding that you would in effect be ten times heavier without being stronger; which means that you wouldn't be able to lift yourself up)—be aware that this was his standard metaphorical argument for systemic innovation; the point of which is that when the amount of information increases by many orders of magnitude, and the speed of events and complexity of interaction grow accordingly—it is not enough to simply grow the systems we've been using to handle information; the structure of information and its systems will also need to be changed!

What a wonderful message that "innovation journalism" may give to Silicon Valley!

So what should IT innovation be like? When you hear Doug use the words "capability" and "augmentation", know that it's his own authentic systemic innovation methodology he's referring to; 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 Doug throughout his long and productive life and career (and led, among other things, to "the personal computing and the Internet", as Markoff pointed out). At some point Doug will flash a slide to explain it; in whose middle you'll see "Capability Infrastructure", with "Human System" on its left and "Tool System" on its right. Doug's systemic innovation methodology was focused on augmenting human capabilities—both individual and collective. But what is "capability infrastructure"? Consider any human capability, for instance to communicate in writing; clearly this capability depends on some "tool system" components such as the clay tablets or the printing press; and on some "human system" components such as literacy and education. But once you do have this capability—other capabilities, such as to develop literature, and scientific communication, also become accessible. Doug's method was to look at this whole picture; and ask—what capabilities (among those we can augment at a given point in evolution) will make the largest positive difference (considering society's condition, and needs). And so the overall main point that Doug was trying to share with journalism innovators was that our overall new situation is such that certain new capabilities urgently need to be augmented; including our collective perception of situations and problems to begin with; and importantly the high-level explanatory and strategic insights, that would enable safe and meaningful governance of the post-industrial civilization in peril; and even the capability to understand what hinders the kind of evolution that the social organism needs for survival (I was just wondering if you guys interact with sociologists, and anthropologists...).

A most useful message that "innovation journalism" may deliver to—journalism!

And if you watch the entire video, and see the whole event—you'll see that it concludes with Doug's recommendation to create the dialog; as a medium where isolated voices and ideas like his may remain recorded—and interact and cross-fertilize with other people's visions and ideas.

So here it is—you may now enjoy the Doug Engelbart show at IJ4.

Coming now to our public informing prototype, which we crafted at our 2011 workshop in Barcelona—this one too has a number of design patterns that are artfully woven together; so let me here zoom in on those two functions that Doug was pointing to—namely on public informing's "perception" function on the one side, and its "interpretative" or strategic function on the other (the function of turning the view of things happening out there into high-level comprehension and action. We envisioned our public informing prototype as operating within two loops, adjoined together to form the number 8 (Mei Lin visualized them as a butterfly's two wings, enabling the society 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 had the key role of transforming academic insights into something everyone can comprehend (remember what I told you about ideograms). Isn't this the place where all the fancy immersive media technologies will become truly useful to humanity?

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; who was 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 Program for the Future, a Silicon Valley-based initiative to continue the work on the still ignored parts of Doug Engelbart's vision) 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. If you listened to Engelbart's talk a bit further, you heard him talk about "structured argumentation" and the challenge of structuring and organizing our collective discourse on society's important themes online; which is exactly what DebateGraph has been so successfully achieving. We used DebateGraph to both document our prototype—and as a core functional element of the prototype.

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 led us to another really basic general insight; which merits a paragraph of its own.

When we think about aligning sufficient power to tip the power balance and incite the sort of change that will make a difference—we naturally think of the people in power positions—political and business leaders, famous academics and so on; and we try to convince them and bring them to do something. But the people who are in power positions within the system or power structure as it is do not have the power to change the system; they are too busy running it; and anyhow—their power comes from the system, it's part of that system. What the people in power, however, can and need to do is empower the young people—who are in a life phase where change is natural—to (instead of reproducing the systems we are part of) create the systems in which they will live and work.

This empowerment is anyhow what we as generation above all owe to our next generation.

And by the way—that's where my idiomatic keyword systems really originated from; Bela Banathy wrote in Designing Social Systems ...: "Quotation".

... 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 workshop in Mei Lin's house in Palo Alto, 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. We had the Europe Club Zagreb as venue; whose windows opened to the Croatian capital’s main square. Yuzuru Tanaka joined us from Japan; Mei Lin Fung, Jack Park and Sam Hahn flew in from California, David Price from England, Alf Johansen from Norway. The A-players were represented by two Croatian student organizations—e-Student (“e” is for “excellence”) and Creativity Club, and by several international ones; Croatian Venture Cup was represented by its director, and academic journalism by its Croatian leader.

With a group of A-players we then took a cosy and bonding minibus tour (sponsored by my mother) through Bosnia and Herzegovina to Dubrovnik; with overnighting in Muslibegović House Mostar and a Sevdalinka garden concert that Ibrica Jusić so graciously gave us. In Dubrovnik we had our third biennial workshop at IUC; and began—with A-players—to co-create what is now the Collaborology education prototype; which is a game-changing game in education.

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 it is conceived in the traditional way—namely as a way to socialize or condition our next generation to fit into the world.

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: Education by push damages creativity and initiative, education by pull enhances them; push education is once in a lifetime, pull education can be life-long and flexible.

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. The domain map object—the core enabling technology this prototype is based on—was a variation on Engelbart's "dynamic knowledge repository" theme.

Both the collaborology course and its predecessor have been conceived as design labs; where the students self-organize in small teams, and create the learning resources for the next-generation students; which has a number of advantages—one of which is that it stimulates collaborative creation for common good (and not studying for the grade).

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", in a talk 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.