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

The KF proposal

We have candles as headlights

From around the middle of the 19th century, and until the first decades of the 20th century, everything changed: Our countries became democracies, our worldview became scientific and secular, our lifestyle became mechanized and modern. Everything changed—and then for about a century remained frozen!

Meanwhile the wave of change continued—and we now have

• a completely different understanding of language, truth and reality, and of the meaning and purpose of information and its relationship with power
• a completely new information technology—first the TV, and the immersive audio-visual media, and then the Internet and the interactive digital media
• completely changed societal needs and challenges—from increasing productivity, to understanding and controlling our newly acquired powers to change the planetary systems, and bring about our own end
• the heritage of the world traditions—which for the first time came together and became available

We propose to create new 'headlights'

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."

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

Or to rephrase this in the language of our metaphor, we are proposing to create the 'headlights'—instead of trying to make use of whatever happens to be there; instead of blindly adopting what we've inherited from the past.

"Knowledge federation" means 'connecting the dots'

Knowledge federation can now be understood as the principle of operation of the new 'headlights'.

The purpose of knowledge federation is to restore the agency to information, and the power to knowledge.

Knowledge federation achieves this purpose by combining fragmented pieces of information together, to give them visibility and impact. Or as our logo might suggest—by 'connecting the dots'.

By 'connecting the dots', we can reach a new insight—and see an issue or a situation in a new way, show how it may need to be handled. Or we can create a prototype—and give this insight a way to impact reality.

We have created a prototype

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

The substance of our proposal is the Knowledge Federation prototype—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.