Imagine...

You are about to board a bus for a long night ride, when you notice two flickering streaks of light emanating from two wax candles, placed in the circular holes where the headlights of the bus are expected to be. Candles? As headlights?

Of course, the idea of candles as headlights is absurd. So why propose it? Because on a much larger scale this absurdity has become reality.

By depicting our society as a bus without a steering wheel, and the way we look at the world and try to comprehend it and handle it as a pair of candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram renders the essence of our contemporary situation.

Modernity ideogram

Our proposal

The core of our knowledge federation proposal is to change the relationship we have with information.

What is our relationship with information presently like? Here is how Neil Postman described it:

"The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it."

Suppose we handled information as we handle other man-made things—by suiting it to the purposes that need to be served.

What consequences would this have? How would information be different? How would it be used? By what methods, what social processes, and by whom would it be created? What new information formats would emerge, and supplement or replace the traditional books and articles? How would information technology be adapted? What would public informing be like? And academic communication, and education?

Our knowledge federation proposal is a complete and academically coherent answer to those and other related questions; an answer that is not only described and explained, but also implemented—in a collection of real-life embedded prototypes.

The Information idogram, shown on the right, shows how the information resulting from knowledge federation is to be different.

The ideogram shows an "i", which stands for "information", as composed of a circle placed on top of a square. The square stands for the details; and also for looking at a theme of choice from all sides, by using diverse kinds of sources and resources. The circle, or the dot on the "i", stands for the function or the point of it all. That might be an insight into the nature of a situation; or a rule of thumb, pointing to a general way to handle situations of a specific kind; or a project, which implements such handling.

Information ideogram

By showing the circle as being founded on the square, the Information ideogram points to knowledge federation as a social process (the 'principle of operation' of the socio-technical 'lightbulb'), by which the insights, principles, strategic handling and whatever else may help us understand and take care of our increasingly complex world are kept consistent with each other, and with the information we own.

Knowledge federation is itself a result of knowledge federation: We draw core insights about handling information from the sciences, communication design, journalism... And we weave them into technical solutions. See, for instance, this excerpt from Richard Feynman's book "The Character of Phyhsical Law", where what we call knowledge federation is described and pointed to as the very essence of the scientific approach to knowledge.

An application

If we implemented knowledge federation on a society-wide scale—what difference would this make? The Holotopia prototype, which is under development, is a proof of concept application.

Aurelio Peccei's assessment of our civilization's condition, which summarized the results of the first decade of The Club of Rome's research, in 1981, provided a benchmark challenge for putting our proposal to test:

"It is absolutely essential to find a way to change course."

Aurelio Peccei

Already the fact that Peccei's dramatic call to action remained for four decades without suitable response is an interesting anomaly. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, it is the anomalies that motivate the development of new paradigms—which is what we are proposing.

Another core insight of The Club of Rome that remained ignored is a strategic one—that lasting solutions will not found by focusing on individual problems, but by transforming the general condition (which they called "problematique", and "the predicament of mankind") from which they all stem as consequences, or symptoms.

Peccei also suggested a way in which we'll need to "change course", and resolve the "problematique":

"The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future."

This suggestion reaffirmed a similar assessment made by Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss, who has been credited formulating the concept and the program of "deep ecology".

No less relevant for the Holotopia initiative is Peccei's following observation, made as a concluding remark in "One Hundred Pages for the Future", which points to a root cause of the "problematique":

The arguments posed in the preceding pages (...) point out several things, of which one of the most important is that our generations seem to have lost the sense of the whole.

Seeing things whole

When federating Peccei's call to action, we did not repeat and verify The Club of Rome's findings. The Club of Rome was itself a federation effort—where one hundred expert and policy makers were selected and organized to gather and create the information that would, in the language of our metaphor, 'illuminate the way'. Our prototype, on the other hand, is a model of an order of things where important insights, such as the ones that resulted from their efforts, are federated rather than ignored. And so we simply continued their work, by federating further. What exactly do we need to do to "change course"? What insights are powerful enough to trigger "a great cultural revival"? The Holotopia project is the vehicle of this federation.

In the context of the Holotopia, we refer to to our proposed prototype 'lightbulb' by its pseudonym holoscope. The idea is to highlight its distinguishing characteristic—that it helps us see things whole.

Perspective ideogram

The holoscope uses suitable information in a suitable way, to illuminate what remained obscure or hidden, so that we may correctly see the shape and the dimensions of the whole (correct our perspective).

BottomUp - TopDown intervention tool for shifting positions, which was part of our pilot project in Kunsthall 3.14, Bergen, suggests how this proposed information is to be used—by transcending fixed relations between top and bottom, and building awareness of the benefits of multiple points of view; and moving in-between.

The holoscope complements the usual approach in the sciences:

Science gave us new ways to look at the world: The telescope and the microscope enabled us to see the things that are too distant or too small to be seen by the naked eye, and our vision expanded beyond bounds. But science had the tendency to keep us focused on things that were either too distant or too small to be relevant—compared to all those large things or issues nearby, which now demand our attention. The holoscope is conceived as a way to look at the world that helps us see any chosen thing or theme as a whole—from all sides; and in correct proportions.

The simple idea is that once again—just as the case was at the dawn of the Enlightenment, when Galilei was in house arrest—a fundamental change in the relationship we have with information is the natural way to "change course". We show, however, that this course change in handling knowledge is not a departure from the academic approach to knowledge, but the natural way to resume its evolution. When establishing this new paradigm in knowledge work, we are facing a large challenge which is a paradox—to establish a new paradigm solidly on the terrain of the existing one. We do that by relying on a single axiom or principle:

Knowledge must be federated!

To legitimately be able to say that we "know" something, we must first verify that it's compatible with other knowledge, and with available data. Our principle demands that information should not be simply ignored (because it belongs to another discipline; or another religion; or because it fails to belong to an established discipline or religion). In a complex world plagued by an overabundance of data, to understand anything we are of course compelled to simplify. But this simplification must be done by federating information, not by ignoring it.

This principle is exactly what has distinguished the academic approach to knowledge since its inception.

A vision

What possible futures can we see, when proper 'light' is used to illuminate our situation?

The holotopia is an astonishingly positive future scenario.

Like the utopia, the holotopia is a vision of a highly desirable future. This future vision is indeed more desirable than the ones that were offered by the familiar utopias—whose authors lived in times when the resources we have today were not available; or lacked the information to see what is possible.

But unlike the utopias, the holotopia is readily realizable—because we already own the information that is needed for its fulfillment.

Making things whole

What exactly do we need to do, to "change course" and 'travel' toward holotopia?

From all the detailed information that we carefully selected and considered, and organized and made available in the square so that this claim can be verified, we distilled a simple principle or rule of thumb: We need to see ourselves and what we do as parts in a larger whole or wholes; and act in ways that make those larger wholes more whole.

This is, needless to say, a radical departure from the ethical stance that is now common.

And it is, indeed, exactly the course of action that the Modernity ideogram is pointing to.

A project

As a project, the Holotopia completes the mentioned federation by initiating or bootstrapping the fulfillment of the holotopia vision.

Margaret Mead's familiar dictum points to this project's core mission:

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

It is, however, the 'small print' that we found most useful—Mead's insights, based on her research, into what exactly distinguishes "a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens" that is capable of making a large difference.

The following Mead's observation, made more than fifty years ago, points to an immediate effect of the Holotopia project:

"One necessary condition of successfully continuing our existence is the creation of an atmosphere of hope that the huge problems now confronting us can, in fact, be solved—and can be solved in time."