Difference between revisions of "Main Page"

– If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

"If I have seen further," Sir Isaac Newton famously declared, "it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Imagine if we would lose this all-important ability, to take advantage of the best ideas of our best minds: What sort of problems, and what sort of situation would that lead us to? Imagine if we would then regain it: What sort of opportunities would that open up?

– The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

In Knowledge Federation we have made a discovery. We did not discover that the insights that could change our understanding of life’s basic issues were drowning in an ocean of glut; our giants diagnosed that long ago, and documented it thoroughly. (But needless to say, these insights too drowned in an ocean of glut and remained without effect.) And anyhow – what else could one expect in a culture where vast and rapidly growing technological and human resources are being used to merely mass-produce and broadcast information?

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

What we did find out – when we began to develop and apply the remedial praxis we are calling knowledge federation – was that it naturally changes the way we understand and handle pivotal issues, just as the case was in Newton's time. When the best insights of our best minds are combined together across the boundaries of academic disciplines and fields of interest, what results are radically different answers to core questions including the nature of truth and meaning, in what way might happiness be successfully pursued, what still impedes our freedom and democracy, and what technological innovation may need to be like to benefit us incomparably more than it currently does. We also found out that those emerging new ways of conceiving human and societal realities are not just random departures from our habitual ones, but that they form a coherent system of ideas or paradigm.

We found out, in other words, that we already own sufficient knowlege to ignite a change reminiscent of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, or “a great cultural revival”, which a giant identified as necessary in our condition. And to achieve that by doing no more than what a homo sapiens might anyhow consider his evolutionary privilege and responsibility – namely by using knowledge to understand and manage the world we live in.

– To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality", wrote Buckminster Fuller. "To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

What is being proactively problematized on these pages is the way we handle a most precious resource – human creativity, insight, ingenuity... and its fruits accumulated through the ages. When showcasing knowledge federation we undertake to:

• Demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that a radically better alternative is within reach
• Streamline the co-creation or evolution of this better alternative

In each of the main four modules of this website we illuminate this alternative from a specific angle. In each of them we apply and showcase a different knowledge federation technique or set of techniques to that purpose.