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– 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 situation would result? Imagine if we would then regain it: What 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 best insights of our best minds were drowning in an ocean of glut. The visionary thinkers who inspired us to begin Knowledge Federation reached that conclusion long ago, and urged the scientists to find a remedy. But needless to say, their insights too drowned in an ocean of glut, and remained without effect. The result is, as Neil Postman observed, that we are living in a culture that is using its vast and increasingly powerful technological and human and other resources to only 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 now, just as in Newton's time, when we 'stand on the shoulders of giants' we see the world differently. When we 'connected the dots' – i.e. when we combined the relevant insights across the boundaries of academic disciplines and fields of interest and traditions, the result was 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 far 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 the knowledge needed 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. What is missing is the will and the ability to federate that knowledge – identify the relevant pieces, make them comprehensible, combine them together, and secure that they are acted on.

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

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

The issue that is being proactively problematized on these pages is the way we handle a most precious resource – human creativity (or insight, ingenuity, capacity to envision and induce change...) and its fruits accumulated through the ages – at the moment in our history where we may need to depend on it more than we ever did.

Considering the uncommon importance of this issue, we have done an as thorough job as we were able building and documenting "a new model" and paving the way for its practical and wide-scale deployment. That is what is documented on these pages. But before we begin to explore its details, let us make sure that the exact nature of our proposal is made clear.

Our goal is to add a new capability to our knowledge work's and more generally creative work's repertoire – the capability to recreate itself.

When we talk about an academic new paradigm or about a new paradigm in knowledge work in general, we are not implying that we should replace the currently dominant one. Our proposal is to add something to the academic scheme of things that is necessary for giving the insights and results that are being created, or have been created, visibility and impact. We are talking about putting good knowledge 'into the driver's seat', so to speak. As Thomas Kuhn observed, paradigms tend to be "incommensurable" – they are different ways of conceiving a field of interest, so that each is more suitable for its own specific purpose or purposes than others. The paradigm we are talking about is in our handling of information and knowledge at large. The purpose it is intended to serve is making knowledge radically better used and more useful, or "making knowledge count".

Similarly when we talk about an alternative strategy for handling the contemporary issues, the paradigm strategy as we are calling it, we are not proposing to replace the excellent and necessary efforts that are being made to understand and handle the specific problems such as the climate change, or poverty, or to reach the millennium goals. The paradigm strategy is intended to on the one hand radically increase the prospect of success of those most worthwhile efforts; and on the other hand to make them (permit us to say) more solid – by adding the necessary fundamental and structural updates and upgrades, so that our efforts to build a viable future for our civilization and our children do not depend on those yesterday's ways of thinking and working that are manifestly ill-conceived or obsolete.

And finally and most importantly, by calling knowledge federation a prototype (of a paradigm in knowledge work), and by conceiving each of its constituent elements including this presentation as prototypes, we undertake to make it clear that our ambition is not to offer a solution, but something far more humble and at the same time far larger and more important than that – namely to engender a process by which our knowledge work and all its constituent elements will become the subjects, and the objects, of knowledge work. And of continued evolution – and if the need may be also re-creation.

By developing and showcasing knowledge federation we undertake to:

• Demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that a new paradigm in knowledge work is both necessary and possible
• Streamline the co-creation, real-life deployment and scaling, and continued evolution of such an alternatives

In each of the first three main modules of this website we illuminate the knowledge federation model from a specific angle. In each of them we demonstrate a different set of knowledge federation techniques by applying them to that purpose. In the fourth, Conversations, we orchestrate the federation of knowledge federation itself – by initiating a two-way communication where our current proposal is on the one hand understood and on the other hand continuously updated by new ideas and insights, through the agency of our "collective intelligence"; and which on the other hand builds a new way to communicate and a new public sphere, making us radically more "collectively intelligent", and capable of taking up the kind of issues we are raising and of course all others, and bringing them to shared insights and conclusions, and ultimately and most importantly into action they need to be able to illicit.

See