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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?

Isaac Newton

– 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 handling 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?

File:Vannevar Bush.jpeg
Vannevar Bush

– 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. We found out that we can achieve that by doing no more than what a homo sapiens might anyhow consider his evolutionary privilege and responsibility – by using knowledge to understand and manage the world we live in.

Aurelio Peccei

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– 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.”

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

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

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

R. Buckminster Fuller

See

• Federation through Images, where we look at fundamental or academic side of knowledge federation. Our ideas of what constitutes "good" knowledge and "good" information evolved since antiquity, and now find their foremost expression in science and philosophy. We show how the insights reached in science and philosophy empower a new way to create truth and meaning, which empowers us to respond directly to the vital contemporary needs of people and society. We use the metaphorical and often funny, paradoxical and thought-provoking images called ideograms, which in knowledge federation have a similar role as mathematical formulas do in conventional science – condense a long analysis into an insight that can be recognized at a glance. The IMAGES module presents a cartoon-like introduction to knowledge federation's philosophical underpinnings.
• Federation through Stories, where we use vignettes (short, lively, catchy, sticky... real-life people and situation stories) to explain and empower some of the core ideas of our giants. The vignettes liberate the insights from the language of a discipline and enable any of us to "step into the shoos" of a leading thinker, to "look through his eye glasses". By combining vignettes into threads, and by weaving threads into patterns and patterns into gestalts, we create a hierarchy of general insights that can inform the handling of core practical issues, including the ones related to happiness, religion, democracy and innovation.
• Federation through Applications, we present knowledge federation as creative frontier. About 40 prototypes cover a spectrum of creative direction that this new approach to ignites and requires to. What might scientific communication be like to federate core insights across disciplines? What might public informing need to be like to enable us to take advantage of those insights? In what we may education need to be different to empower our coming generations to develop the emerging societal paradigm and ignite a new era of progress? How might knowledge federation help a core field of activity (such as design and innovation) redefine itself? How might "addiction" be defined in a new way, to empower us to avoid using new technology to create new and unrecognized addictions?
• Federation through Conversations is where we streamline of main course of action – creation of real-life federation processes and infrastructures. The core technique is the dialog, which empowers change just as the debate – its present-day counterpart – disables it. Through public dialogs we both place the insights of the giants into the public sphere, and engage the public to add their own insights, so that our understanding of core issues might evolve further. We orchestrate a social process through which the public may understand and handle core issues in entirely new ways.