Prospecting a creative frontier

A case for liberating academic creativity

Imagine a world where academic creativity were not confined to the production of peer-reviewed articles in traditional fields. Where we were empowered to let our creativity soar and produce any idea or action that may make a significant-enough difference in this precarious moment of our history.

Prototyping the lightbulb

From our portfolio of applications we select and show a representative sample. Our intention is not to survey or to inform, but to illustrate an emerging paradigm – first of all the practical difference it can make (as suggested on the front page by the bus with candle headlights metaphor, and our four main keywords). And then also by demonstrating the breadth and depth of possible creative achievements – which will justify us in calling this an academic paradigm.

While illustrating the depth and breadth of the creative field, we also emphasize its coherence and unity. Each of the prototypes will illustrate the lavishly large benefits that can result – in its specific field – from the systemic approach to creative work we called systemic innovation and knowledge federation. No less important is the way how different design ideas synergize with one another and form a coherently functioning whole.

This presentation will begin with the most practical and applied applications, and add with the ones that are more academic or methodological.

Next-generation inventions

Imagine a world where the inventions are allowed to be new socio-technical systems and processes for knowledge work and beyond – making our work incomparably more effective and efficient. (...)

These applications are prototypes

Prototypes as a knowledge federation technique

Think about our core challenge – to bring relevant and transformative ideas from a multiplicity of fields together, and have them bear upon institutional and other systemic solutions, in real-life practice. How can this be achieved?

The prototypes are innovative systemic solutions implemented in practice, and strategically embedded in practice, aiming to change it.

By putting the prototype in charge of a transdisciplinary community (which we call a transdiscipline) to create it and update it continuously, we secure that the state of the art knowledge from relevant fields has a way to impact the design of the prototype, and vice-versa – that the challenges encountered in this design have a way of becoming challenges to pertinent academic and other creative communities.

In the paradigm we are presenting, the prototypes play the role of (1) models (because they embody design ideas and solutions in a way that makes them easy to adapt to other creative tasks and situations), (2) interventions (into real-life systems and situations) and (3) experiments (because they allow us to see what works and what needs to be improved).

The prototypes together form a single overarching prototype, the knowledge federation – for which the Knowledge Federation is the prototype transdiscipline.

Evangelizing prototypes for systemic innovation

We may not lack the resources

In the 1960s Buckminster Fuller predicted that by the end of the century the science and technology would have advanced so much that we would be able to put an end to "the age of scarcity" and all the competition it entails. Did history prove him wrong?

We show why Fuller may have been right – and that our key issue is that our systems waste resources – by composing a thread of three vignettes, of which the one just mentioned is the last.

The thread begins with a vignette about Charles Ferguson, mathematician - turned political scientist - turned IT entrepreneur – turned Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. Ferguson chose to point out (by creating two documentary films) that two recent events – the war in Iraq and the 2008 financial crisis – were caused by internal or systemic defects. By connecting his insight with David McCandles' Billion-Dollar-o-Gram (which visually displays the cost of large global issues), it is shown that those two issues Ferguson pointed to cost the humanity so much that "saving the Amazon" and "Lifting one billion people out of extreme poverty" would cost practically nothing in comparison.

See

• Lecture recording Systemic Innovation Positively, where this thread begins at minute 9.
• The Billion-Dollar-o-Gram 2009

A scientific approach to problems

If you wake up with red spots all over our skin, you will not attempt to rub them off or paint them over. Scientific medicine relies on an understanding of anatomy and physiology to treat the underlying (i.e. systemic) causes. Why not treat our societal ills similarly?

See

• Toward a Scientific Understanding and Treatment of Problems report of a workshop talk where an analogy between scientific medicine and contemporary issues is developed.

Evangelizing prototypes for knowledge federation

The largest contribution to knowledge

What is the largest contribution to human knowledge you may imagine?

We asked this question in an evangelizing talk that was given in several occasions at the point where knowledge federation was just beginning to take shape. Our point was to show that the contributions to knowledge that are changes of 'the algorithm' or 'the mechanism' i.e. the changes of the social organization of knowledge work can be incomparably larger than the contributions of knowledge itself.

The vignette that brings this opportunity down to earth is about the evolution of post-war sociology, during which this field grew about five times in the number of researchers and publications. In the course of which the sociology divided itself into a number of factions that were losing contact with each other – and with the society whose malfunctions sociology is expected to reveal. The "largest contribution" observation is just a generalization of the claim made by Pierre Bourdieu about sociology – at the point where he and his overseas colleague James Coleman were attempting reorganization.

See

• "What is knowledge federation?" recording of our evangelizing talk at Trinity College Dublin, where the above argument is elaborated during the initial seven minutes
• "Knowledge Federation as a Principle of Knowledge Organization and Sharing" article in the proceedings of the first Knowledge Federation workshop, where the case for knowledge federation is made by first telling about the post-war evolution of sociology as a springboard story.

Knowledge work has a flat tire

Academic and media publishing is like trying to speed ahead by pressing the gas pedal, in a car that has a flat tire. Our knowledge work has a structural or systemic defect, which must be attended to first.

The concrete story, which demonstrates this issue, is about two high-profile scientists bringing contradicting views about the climate change to academic audiences and the media.

We told this vignette as a springboard story at our workshop at Stanford University in 2011, where we pointed to knowledge federation and systemic innovation as an emerging trend.

See

• Knowledge Work Has a Flat Tire

Collective intelligence in practice

Debategraph

None of us can be as knowledgeable as all of us together!

Debategraph is an online platform that enables people and communities to combine together the knowledge and ideas that are relevant to an issue. With 25000 maps covering a broad variety of topics including some of our society's most urgent and most interesting ones, and the user community that includes the CNN, the White House, the UK Prime Minister's Office, The Independent, and the Foreign Office among others, Debategraph is successfully changing the way in which core issues are debated and understood.

Peter Baldwin, Debategraph's co-founder, was a cabinet minister in a couple of Australian governments, until he got so tired of seeing the issues voted on without being understood – that he retired early, bought himself a home in Australian Highlands, and learned how to program the computer... David Price, the other co-founder, has a doctorate in organizational learning and environmental policy from the University of Cambridge, and a similar passion as Baldwin for making knowledge count. Conveniently, the two men are on two opposite sides of the globe. Debategraph never sleeps!

See

• Debategraph's introduction to itself

Induct Software

Imagine a collectively intelligent business; or even better – an ecosystem where the business and its clients and suppliers are all linked together, and can freely co-create improvements and solutions.

Henry Chesbrough of UC Berkeley observed that innovation can be made incomparably more effective and efficient if it can be made "open". Norwegian entrepreneur Alf Martin Johansen heard his talk while visiting Berkeley, and another talk about Web 2.0, and saw that the two ideas can be naturally combined. Induct Software, the global business venture he created, has Chesbrough as the head of its advisory board – and the ambition "to interconnect the global innovation ecosystem".

See

• Induct website (make sure to watch the two-minute video)
• This Youtube video where Henry Chesbrough tells the story of Induct's beginning.

Enhancing the evolution of knowledge

Meme Media and Webbles

Imagine if knowledge were not locked up in traditional documents – but made available in reconfigurable hypermedia, which one could cut and paste at will and produce new hypermedia and new knowledge.

Engelbart called the enabling technology "open hyperdocument system", and demoed a version of it in 1968. Meme Media and Webbles in effect turn the Web into an open hyperdocument system. Both hypermedia content and web services can be combined together – which opens a realm of opportunities for creating smart documents. The higher purpose of meme media is to enhance the evolution of knowledge by allowing "cultural genes" or "memes" to cross-fertilize.

See

• Webble World Portal
• M. Kuwahara and Y. Tanaka: Webbles: Programmable and Customizable Meme Media Objects in a Knowledge Federation Framework Environment on the Web Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Knowledge Federation, CEUR-WS, Vol. 822, Dubrovnik, 2010.

Knowledge Gardening and TopicQuests

Imagine if instead of each of us working on our own project and article, we would be freely exchanging both questions and solution ideas continuously, as they emerge! Imagine if we could in effect think and create together, on a global scale, as if we were sitting in the same room. Or as if we were cells in a single creative mind!

Knowledge Gardening, developed by Jack Park and his team, builds on Engelbart's core notion of Dynamic Knowledge Repository.

Park was an SRI researcher and system developer in artificial intelligence, until he met Engelbart, who promptly convinced him that the collective intelligence was our most urgent need.

See

• Jack Park: Knowledge Gardening as Knowledge Federation. Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Knowledge Federation, CEUR-WS, Vol. 552, Dubrovnik, 2008.
• A technical overview of TopicQuests

Empowering the young to co-create their future

The Game-Changing Game

Imagine you met a fairy... In our presentation at the San Francisco Bay Area Future Salon, we introduced The Game-Changing Game by asking the audience to make an as audacious wish for contribution or achievement as they were able to conceive of. After everyone shared their wishes we showed how such wishes may be made true through systemic innovation.

The Game-Changing Game is a generic method for recreating and changing real-life socio-technical systems. There are two categories of 'players'. The Z-players are self-selected from among the people in power positions (professors, investors...); they 'play' by empowering the A-players (students, entrepreneurs...) to 'play' their life and career 'games' in a game-changing way – by changing rather than only learning and adopting their professions.

See

• Future Salon Q&A
• blog post The Game-Changing Game – A Practical Way to Craft the Future with the link to the EAD article with the same title.
• The blog post Information Age Coming of Age is the history of the creation and presentation (at the Bay Area Future Salon) of The Game-Changing Game, which features Doug Engelbart and some of his closest friends and collaborators such as Bill and Roberta English and Mei Lin Fung.

The Club of Zagreb

The Club of Zagreb is a re-design of The Club of Rome based on The Game-Changing Game. This is essentially a club of Z-players – who decided to make a difference by empowering the A-players, the young ones, to "play their life and career games in a game-changing way".

This prototype is a result of Knowledge Federation's collaboration with two student excellence networks in Croatia: the eSTUDENT and the Creativity Centerexcellence network; And with The European Movement Croatia and the Zagreb business incubation hub.

In September 2012 (prior to our regular biennial workshop at the Inter University Center Dubrovnik) we gathered in Zagreb to initiate and inaugurate The Club of Zagreb. Mei Lin Fung (the founder of The Program for the Future – Silicon Valley-based initiative to continue and complete "Engelbart's unfinished revolution") and Jack Park flew in from California, Yuzuru Tanaka from Japan, David Price from England...

See

• The invitation letter to the opening of The Club of Zagreb.

Education for an evolving society

Collaborology

What will education need to be like to support our transition into the next paradigm?

Education, even when it does not intend that, recreates the world with every new generation. But our present education is conceived to recreate the same world. Not only because of the age-old disciplinary content it delivers, but also by its traditional delivery where education that is received at a young age is expected to last a lifetime. Naturally the people will resist change – unless they too are empowered to change as well, by re-educating themselves accordingly.

Unlike the MOOCs, where information is broadcasted, in Collaborology a range of knowledge resources are co-created or federated through collaboration of leading international experts and students. In a knowledge-work ecosystem that results, the students play the role of bacteria in the most positive sense of this word – by composting the dead bodies of knowledge and extracting vital nutrients to be reused for a new purpose. Collaborology in this way also provides a practical way in which a new body of knowledge (media-enabled collaboration) can be created and disseminated (or in a word federated). The economies of scale (where a single expert creates only a single module or lecture for global use) enable the use of immersive and other new technologies in education. Also these economies of scale enable everyone to contribute to higher organisation and quality of knowledge and knowledge work – instead of merely augmenting the speed and the quantity of production.

See

• Collaborology course flyer
• Article Steps toward a Federated Course Model where core design patterns are described
• [karabeg WAAS rome 2017 Collaborology Abstract Systemic Innovation in Education – the Collaborology Prototype] of our lecture at World Academy's Future Education conference in 2017 in Rome]
• Audio recording and slides of a one-hour introduction to the Collective Mind paradigm – where the first half-hour is "Eight vignettes to evangelize a paradigm", and the second half explains the Collaborology prototype in terms of its design patterns (ways to remedy the anomalies pointed to in the first half, explained by using education as example application).

Domain Maps

If we should empower our students to choose what they want to learn freely, in accordance with their background and future plans – in what way shall we provide them guidance? In what way will the curriculum, and the exam, be organized?

Our prototype answer is a new technology called domain maps (it was earlier called Polyscopic Topic Maps)

See

• Course flyer for the transdisciplinary University of Oslo course called Information Design, precursor to Collaborology, where this methodology was developed and applied and tested in actual practice.
• Article Flexible and Exploratory Learning by PolyscopicTopic Maps describes both the course model and the enabling technology.
• Article Boundary Objects for Online Knowledge Management
• Improvised Knowledge Federation domain map on Debategraph

Leadership and Systemic Innovation

This PhD program has been initiated and developed at the Buenos Aires Institute of Technology by Alexander Laszlo, to educate the leaders capable of bringing systemic innovation into actual practice.

See

• The presentation of this program on Debategraph

Doug Engelbart´s Unfinished Revolution – the Program for the Future

This PhD seminar helped us thoroughly research, and made available as a graduate-level computer science course, Doug Engelbart´s core ideas.

See

• Course website

Movement and Qi

If you'll now recall Aurelio Peccei's prognosis – that our future will have to be a "an inspired product" of a cultural revival – then the challenge is open for making education more than just the mental know-how. In what way can we incorporate the work with the students' minds and bodies into the academic scheme of things?

Polyscopy comes to our rescue. The designed concept "movement" includes anything that is done with the body such as meditation and yoga. The designed concept "qi" – while resembling the corresponding oriental one – is really just a way to model and communicate the reported effects that the movement may have.

Included in this prototype is a marketing strategy – an experiment in making this type of work accessible and attractive to students and academic workers.

See

• Movement and Qi posters were used in this strategy by pairing them randomly and exposing on strategic spots on the campus.

Journalism for an informed society

Barcelona 2011 Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism prototype

Journalism, or public informing, constitutes the very headlights which today (attempt to) illuminate the world for the majority of people. What should journalism be like to show the people the real or systemic causes to their problem – and to empower them to direct their action toward those causes? In what way will the citizens, and the academic domain experts, be part of the news production?

A no smaller challenge was the question who might be capable of producing a model of such journalism – and in what way? Our 2011 workshop in Barcelona, where this prototype was created, was an opportunity to showcase and put to test the basic knowledge federation approach, where a transdisciplinary community is formed to create and update a prototype. We asked Paddy Coulter – who embodies good journalism – to be the director of the project. David Price of Debategraph and Global Sensemaking was the leader of the "techies" team. Mei Lin Fung (who in 2008 initiated The Program for the Future to complete Engelbart's work) represented the Engelbartian point of view. A team of local journalist and journalism inovators, who were the creators of the Wikidiario citizenship journalism project, and Ramon Sangüesa, an academic collective intelligence expert, were our local hosts.

See

• Engelbart's keynote at Innovation Journalism 4 at Stanford University – where he posits with clarity and precision the challenge to which this project is providing a prototype answer
• Prototype description, An Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism on Debategraph
• Presentation "Recreating Journalism – an Instance of a Paradigm" at the workshop New Media and EU (delivered online) – hear the recording while viewing the Prezi.

Science to the people

Tesla and the Nature of Creativity 2015

How to lift a key academic insight out of a technical jargon of a discipline?

Imagine that a scientist developed a result of very high general interest, and of high potential impact on several fields of science – and wrote an incomprehensible article about it, in the technical jargon of quantum physics. This situation presented itself in reality, and we took advantage of it to develop a complete federation prototype for this type of applications.

The prototype has three natural phases: (1) through collaboration with our communication design team, the article is turned into a multimedia object where the high-level module presents the result in an accessible language of metaphorical diagrams, equipped with recorded interviews with the author to explain the details, and links into the article and the technical details; (2) the second phase placed this result into public awareness, through a high-profile public event and the use of an orchestra of new media; (3) the main ideas are placed online into a Debategraph map, linked with other related ideas, and made available for further elaboration.

In addition to being a prototype in academic communication, this is also a prototype for scientific – and social – creation of truth and meaning. There are two natural ways to broaden the "narrow frame of concepts" that Heisenberg warned us about six decades ago (see Federation through Stories). One of them is what's been pursued here – to create a methodology and social processes etc. The other one is to include the findings of quantum physics into the modeling repertoire of conventional science. This project combines both of them – and in an academically interesting way (...).

No less important is, of course, the title theme of this project – creativity!

Imagine if – because of the mentioned "narrow foundation", we completely misunderstood the nature of creativity. And if we created a research culture, and education, accordingly (...).

See

• Scientific article transformed into a multimedia object – make sure to download the prototype, because the audio recordings cannot be heard in the browser.
• The blog post with detailed description of this project
• Video excerpt from a talk, where this prototype is introduced in an online talk to the Metaversity educational project in Moscow and St Petersburg.

The Lighthouse

Imagine that an entire discipline, or academic community, has a message to the world, which just hasn't been grasped yet. Imagine that this message is essential for understanding and applying in practice all other knowledge produced by the community. And most importantly – that this message is exactly what we the people need to hear and digest to embark on the new evolutionary path (replace the reliance on "the invisible hand" by informed or guided evolution of society.

This prototype has been developed for and with the International Society for the Systems Sciences.

See

• Abstract of The Lighthouse – Innovating the Systems Sciences System abstract presented at ISSS60 at the Univ. of Colorado at Boulder.
• Abstract of Wiener's paradox – we can dissolve it together presented at ISSS59 Berlin
• Hermes prototype description on Debategraph presented at European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research in 2014 in Vienna.

Value matrix object

How can we empower the academic knowledge workers to step beyond he conventional peer-review scheme of things – and contribute in a variety of ways? In what way can we keep record of and honor such contributions? How can we create an academic ecology that is conducive to the emerging paradigm?

Our prototype answer is the value matrix object – a piece of technology associated with each knowledge resource (this includes both documents and people), whose task is to accumulate all information that may be of use for evaluating the value of the resource. This technology is a "matrix" because it stores value information with respect to a multiplicity of criteria, and multiple ways of assessing value.

See

• Article Boundary Objects for Online Knowledge Management
• Article Boundary Infrastructures for Conversational Knowledge Federation
• Improvised Knowledge Federation domain map on Debategraph

Art can once again make a difference

Art for the next renaissance

When we think about the Renaissance, it's Botticelli's Spring and Venus that first come to mind. In every era, and especially in periods of transition, it was the art that brought out its spirit. Can art play a similar role in the contemporary cultural revival? Can art give a new life and expression to the new ideas that now want to emerge? Can the artist once again be the human laboratory in which a new spirit of the age is being concocted?

Can art federate knowledge? Can it be a catalyst, and an intermediary, between the new spirit that might be born in the world of thought, and the social world with people and their emotions? Can art mobilize us in a revolutionary change? And if it can – what should this art be like?

Earth Sharing prototype

What has just been said about design may be applied to art too. Why not federate art as well? Why not develop a synthesis where art and science are united to move the minds and hearts in a vital and vibrant new direction?

We have just recently begun – with the installation in Kunsthall314 art gallery in Bergen, Norway. This project is the mind child of – and a product of collaboration with – Norwegian artist Vibeke Jentsen (based in Berlin and New York).

See

• Earth Lab, Bergen report on Vibeke's website.

Rumi in Oslo

The goal of this project, which was sponsored by the Art Council of Norway, was to "express the eternal message of the classical Persian mystical poet Mevlana Jalaludin Rumi in the language of modern arts". Its purpose was "cultural cross-fertilization: between modern arts and oriental spirituality; between modern culture and love-inspired poetry".

See

• The invitation flyer for one of the events.