STORIES
Contents
Federation through Stories
Pragmatics of an emerging paradigm
innovation for sustainability
We look at the emerging paradigm, as modeled by knowledge federation, from a pragmatic point of view. We have the global issues; and we have the information technology, and innovation in general. How can we inform their future course? We have already seen some of that, of course. But here we approach this most interesting theme by sharing the insights of giants who originated them. Two of them – and we begin our journey by telling their stories – are especially important for us, as progenitors and icons of the two core sides of our initiatives. Douglas Engelbart is introduced here as the icon of knowledge federation; Erich Jantsch is introduced as the icon of systemic innovation.
Vignettes
How to lift up an idea from undeserved anonymity
We tell vignettes – engaging, lively, catchy, sticky... real-life people and situation stories, to distill the core ideas of the most daring thinkers from the vocabulary of their field, and to give them the power of impact. We then show how to join the vignettes together into threads, and threads into patterns and patterns into a gestalt – an overarching view of our situation, which shows how the situation may (need to) be handled.
While it is the ideas that lead to the gestalt, it is the gestalt that gives the ideas their relevance, and their deeper reason for existence.
Nascence of knowledge federation
The 21st century printing press
Of course it's the Web – but...
The printing press is a suitable metaphor and a point of departure for us, because of its central role in the emergence of the last big societal paradigm shift. Indeed, Gutenberg's has often been credited for the spreading of knowledge that resulted in the Enlightenment, and all the other related transformations. What might play a similar role today? The story told next will highlight some of the main points in a palpable and vivid way.
Having decided, as a novice engineer in December of 1950, to direct his career so as to maximize its benefits to the mankind, Douglas Engelbart thought intensely about the best way to do that. After three months he had an epiphany.
On a convention of computer professionals in 1968 Engelbart and his SRI-based lab demonstrated the computer technology we are using today – computers linked together into a network, people interacting with computers via video terminals and a mouse and the windows, and through them with one another.
In the late 1990s the Silicon Valley found out that it was not Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who invented the technology, or even the XEROS Palo Alto Research Center from which they took it. Engelbart became a celebrity. He received all the imaginable honors that an inventor can get. And yet he made it obvious, and everyone around him knew, that he felt celebrated for a wrong reason; and that the gist of his vision had not yet been understood, or put to use. "Engelbart's unfinished revolution" was coined as the theme for the 1998 celebration of Engelbart's Demo at Stanford University, which was repeated a decade later. And it stuck.
Engelbart passed away in 2013, celebrated as the man whose ideas created "the revolution in the Valley", yet feeling that he had failed.
The unfinished revolution
What did he see? What was the essence of his "unfinished revolution"?