Ideograms

Not all images are worth one thousand words

But the ideograms are! They play a similar role in knowledge federation as mathematical formulas do in traditional science. An ideogram can condense a wealth of insights and many pages of text into an image whose message can be recognized at a glance. Recall the Newton's formula, or Einstein's ubiquitous E=mc² – those too are ideograms! But the possibilities behind the ideographic approach are endless, and they vastly surpass the conventional maths.

The creative possibilities of ideograms also surpass our illustrations – and are yet to be developed through creative use of new media.

A new way to be creative

Knowledge federation

By representing our civilization as a bus, and our handling of information as its candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram points to the essence of knowledge federation in a nutshell.

Imagine us all riding in a bus with candle headlights, through obscure and uncharted terrain, at an accelerating speed. Think of the direction of the bus as determined by our likes and dislikes, decisions and priorities. Think of the movement of this bus as our creative work, our efforts to induce change or innovate. To be meaningfully directed and sustainable, posits the Modernity ideogram, our movement into the future must be suitably informed. The information we have, and the we way create it and use it, will not do the job. Our knowledge work evolved based on an old technology, and for a different purpose. An entirely new approach to knowledge is needed, which combines this new purpose with new technology.

No sequence of improvements to a pair of candles will produce a pair of light bulbs. Hence we raise a banner on the creative frontier where the development of a new paradigm in knowledge work can take place – and we give this banner a name, knowledge federation. What we are calling knowledge federation is a socio-technical 'light bulb' that can fulfill the pivotal new purposes that information and knowledge work must fulfill in our society. Knowledge federation also envisioned to be the name of a new academic and more generally creative field, which can inform this development.

Systemic innovation

The Modernity ideogram has also another, more subtle and more general message. It points to a better way to use our creative capabilities in general.

To see it, notice that the headlights are a tiny part of the bus. Their cost and value are negligible in comparison. And yet the design of the headlights can determine the value of everything else – and ultimately decide whether the bus will be a mass-suicide machine, or a vehicle of taking us to any place or condition we may reasonably choose and want to be in. What we are calling systemic innovation is "innovation toward wholeness" – i.e. innovation whose goal is to improve the system or systems in which what is being innovated has a role.

Notice that systemic innovation is indeed a lot more than a technical principle; it points to, and depends on, a profound change of values, and even of the way of being in the world. Notice that as long as we learn our profession as a social role and perform in it competitively, as long as we cater to "market needs" and use the technology to speed up and enhance what the people are already doing, as long as we treat information as a commodity, systemic innovation is not going to take hold and prevail.

A new way to establish facts

Claims made by ideograms need justification

Information that points to direction – of which the Modernity ideogram is an example – need to be made reliable through suitable justification. In what follows we provide a justification with the help of a series of four ideograms, each of which is justified in a separate document – by 'connecting the dots' or 'standing on the shoulders of giants'. The effect we are aiming at is to both establish this new approach to knowledge by grounding it on already established facts and insights – and to at the same demonstrate the pertinent techniques.