(Neil Postman in a televised interview to Open Mind, 1990)

"[...] of people not having any basis for knowing what is relevant, what is irrelevant, what is useful, what is not useful, where they live in a culture that is simply committed, through all of its media, to generate tons of information every hour, without categorizing it in any way for you", Postman continued.

To federate knowledge means to connect the dots.

And add insight (correct interpretation or meaning) to an overload of data; of which "Our house is on fire" is the canonical example: You may know all the room temperatures; but it is only when you know that your house is on fire that you are empowered to act as your situation demands. An insight can ignite an emotional response; it can inject adrenaline into your bloodstream.

Our traditions have instructed us how to handle situations and contingencies by providing us a repertoire of insight and action pairs. But what about those situations that have not happened before?

Knowledge federation uses ideograms to create and communicate insights. An ideogram can condense one thousand words into an image; and make the point of it all recognizable at a glance; and communicate know-what in ways that incite action.

The existing knowledge federation ideograms are only a placeholder—for a variety of techniques that will be developed through artful and judicious use of media technology.

Modernity ideogram

By depicting our society as a bus and our information as its candle headlights, Modernity ideogram renders our situation in a nutshell.

Imagine us as passengers in a bus—which rushes at accelerating speed toward a disaster; because its headlights are too dim to show us the way.

Information must now intervene between us and the world.

And not any sort of information—but information that's been conscientiously designed for this pivotal function.

In Guided Evolution of Society, in 2001, systems scientist Béla H. Bánáthy surveyed a broad range of sources and reached this conclusion:

“We are the first generation of our species that has the privilege, the opportunity, and the burden of responsibility to engage in the process of our own evolution. We are indeed chosen people. We now have the knowledge available to us and we have the power of human and social potential that is required to initiate a new and historical social function: conscious evolution. But we can fulfill this function only if we develop evolutionary competence by evolutionary learning and acquire the will and determination to engage in conscious evolution. These are core requirements, because what evolution did for us up to now we have to learn to do for ourselves by guiding our own evolution.”

To foster the awareness of this new opportunity and responsibility, and develop the information that can provide us “evolutionary guidance”—is the all-important new creative challenge the Modernity ideogram is pointing to.

I qualify something as pivotal if it decisively influences our society's evolutionary course; and as correct if it corrects it.

Information ideogram

What I've just shared explains some of the realistic optimism that distinguishes this proposal: To solve "the huge problems now confronting us"—we do not need to wrestle with "the 1%"; we do not need to convince the politicians; the key to solutions is in our hands—in the hands of publicly sponsored intellectuals! The people out there look up to us to tell them what information needs to be like; we only need to act in accord with the social role we already have.

In the Liberation book I sketched the gist of this strategy by drafting a parallel between information and computer programs; and sharing in a vignette how—when in the early days of computing ambitious software projects resulted in thousands of tangled up lines of code, which nobody could comprehend or correct—the solution was found in the creation of "software design methodologies"; whose creators considered themselves accountable for the (conceptual and technical) tools they gave to programmers.

We academic people too must become accountable.

For the (conceptual and technical) information tools we give to researchers and to society; because it is those tools that now determine whether information will result in a chaos—or in new order.

What should information be like? Ole-Johan Dahl and C.A.R. Hoare wrote in Structured Programming in 1972, in a chapter called “Hierarchical Program Structures”:

“As the result of the large capacity of computing instruments, we have to deal with computing processes of such complexity that they can hardly be understood in terms of basic general purpose concepts. The limit is set by the nature of our intellect: precise thinking is possible only in terms of a small number of elements at a time. The only efficient way to deal with complicated systems is in a hierarchical fashion. The dynamic system is constructed and understood in terms of high level concepts, which are in turn constructed and understood in terms of lower level concepts, and so forth.”

Dahl received the Turing Award (the computer science equivalent for the Nobel Prize) for co-authoring the Object Oriented Methodology; which empowers the programmers to deliver comprehensible, reusable, verifiable and modifiable code by structuring it in terms of "objects". The answer I offered, which the Information ideogram illustrates, is a remake of the same idea; I call it information holon. Arthur Koestler coined the keyword "holon" to denote something that is both a whole in itself and a piece in a larger whole; and I applied it to information.

The Information ideogram is an “i” (for "information"), composed as a circle or dot or point on top of a rectangle; inscribed in a triangle representing the metaphorical mountain. You may interpret the rectangle as representing a multitude of documents; and the point as the point of it all; and this ideogram as a way to say what's obvious—that without a point, a myriad of printed pages are just point-less!

The triangle or the mountain stands for a structure of viewpoints I call scopes; which you'll comprehend if you consider that every standpoint on a mountain offers you a view; and this view is always coherent—you can either look at a tree nearby, or at a forest far below; you can bend down to inspect a flower, or climb up the mountain to see the whole terrain—but you never see both in the same view. The mountain stands for the purpose of it all.

We can come out of "information jungle" by climbing to a mountain top.

And see where the roads lead; and which one we need to follow.

We create meaning by using abstraction. The Information ideogram points to three kinds of abstraction:

• You'll comprehend horizontal abstraction, which is represented by the rectangle, if you think of projective geometry; where a complex object is depicted in terms of a collection of suitably chosen projection planes; so that each of them presents a simple image, while together—they show the object from all sides
• You'll comprehend the vertical abstraction, which is represented by the point, if you think of going up a mountain toward the mountain top—where the whole terrain is visible and the choice of direction is safe and easy
• You'll comprehend structural abstraction, which is represented by the mountain, if you think of the all-important capability a mountain may offer—to consciously choose your viewpoint; and have a simple and coherent view.

The mountain, which is technically called information holarchy, is composed of information holons; where the points of more detailed holons serve as dots to be connected to compose more general ones.

Like "architecture" and "design", knowledge federation is both an activity or praxis (informed practice), and an academic field that develops it. Its function is to complement publishing or broadcasting, by organizing us in co-creating the mountain; and enabling information to result in knowledge; which subsumes, you'll recall, knowledge-based action and re-building or "changing the world"—qguxg "guided" or informed evolution of society necessitates.

Holotopia ideogram

The holotopia initiative is knowledge federation's proof of concept application. It is also the vision that resulted when we applied knowledge federation to five pivotal categories—high-level themes that decisively influences our (society's) evolutionary course:

• innovation—our technology-augmented capability to create, and induce change
• information—which by definition includes not only written documents, but all other forms of heritage or recorded human experience that may help us illuminate the course; and also the social processes by which information is created and put to use
• foundation—on which we develop knowledge; which decides what in our cultural heritage will continue to evolve—and what will be abandoned to decay
• method—by which we create knowledge; and distinguish knowledge from belief
• values—which direct "the pursuit of happiness" and our other pursuits.

When we applied knowledge federation to these five categories, the five points resulted; and showed that in each case the "conventional wisdom" needs to be thoroughly reversed.

The Holotopia ideogram comprises five pillars, each of which has a pivotal category as base and a point or insight as capital; which resulted by accounting for what's been academically published or otherwise reported to elevate us above "the world". The ten themes—represented by the edges joining the five insights—point to the fact that when other similarly important themes such as creativity, religion and education are considered in the context of those five points—their comprehension and handling too ends up being revised and reversed.

An overarching insight resulted from this experiment:

We are not informed.

Our comprehension and handling of the themes that determine our know-what, and of other core themes of our lives and times too—are at the level where our comprehension of natural phenomena was in pre-scientific times. We have all the information we need to create a radically different and better world; but this information is not part of our collective awareness; it is not reflected by the way in which we think and act.

The stars on Holotopia ideogram stand for "reaching for the stars"—i.e. for the sort of achievements and changes that may now be unthinkable; which will be normal in the informed order of things that holotopia initiative undertakes to foster.

My appeal

(Albert Einstein, New York Times, 1946)

In the movie The Matrix, "the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth" epitomized a situation where people live in a devastated and dying world ruled by machines—and in a falsified "reality" that makes the world appear to them as normal; in the Liberation book it epitomizes the situation where people live without guiding insights or principles; where their only reference system is the world itself and its various descriptions; which compels the people to adapt to the world, instead of comprehending it critically.

We live in such a world.

My appeal is to institute a new science—by which I mean to develop a new information praxis, with the dexterity that characterizes science, and offer it to our society by giving it the social esteem that science now enjoys; by which academic and other information will be turned into knowledge; and acted on.

My point is that this course of action is both the human obligation we have toward our next generation—and the necessary next step in academic evolution.

This knowledge federation proposal constitutes a case for this appeal; and makes it actionable.