(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.

Knowledge federation is a social process; whose function is to connect the dots.

And complement publishing and broadcasting; and add meaning or insights to overloads of data.

Among insights, of especial importance are gestalts; 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. A gestalt 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 gestalt 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.

Not any sort of information—but information that's been conscientiously designed for that 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 competence”—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

You'll easily comprehend the Information ideogram if you think of knowledge federation as a collective climb to a mountain top; from where we can clearly see where the roads lead—and which one we need to follow.

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 a multitude of documents; and the point as the point of it all; and this ideogram as a way to way the obvious—that without a point, a myriad of printed pages are just point-less!

You'll comprehend this proposal still more precisely if you imagine the mountain as a structure of viewpoints; which offer you coherent</em> views (you can look at a near-by tree, or at a far-away forest; you can bend down to inspect a flower, or climb up the mountain to see the whole terrain); and think of knowledge federation as the collective process by which we'll build this mountain; in the light of the new competence (conscious evolution) that information must be able to provide:

We can rise above the "information jungle" by climbing to a mountain top.

We create meaning by using abstraction; the Information ideogram illustrates its three kinds:

• Horizontal abstraction, represented by the rectangle—which you'll comprehend if you think of looking at an object from a specific side
• Vertical abstraction, represented by the point—which you'll comprehend if you think of going up the mountain toward its top; where the whole terrain is visible and the choice of direction is easy
• Structural abstraction, represented by the triangle or the mountain—which you'll comprehend if you consider how important it is to be able to consciously choose the ways—several ways—to look at an object; if your task is to see it whole.

The Information ideogram depicts the information holon—which is offered as a structuring template and principle; 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 mountain, technically called information holarchy, is composed of information holons, so that the points of more detailed holons serve as dots to be connected to create those 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 mountains; and in effect adding a third dimension to otherwise flat information; and enabling information to result in knowledge; which subsumes, you'll recall, knowledge-based action that constitutes "conscious evolution" as Bánáthy called it, or "changing the world" as it's more commonly known.

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.