APPLICATIONS

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Federation through Applications

Prospecting a creative frontier

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.

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.

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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?

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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.

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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 were pointed to knowledge federation and systemic innovation as an emerging trend.

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Collective intelligence in practice

Debategraph

Nobody 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 the 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!

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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".

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Enhancing the evolution of knowledge

Meme Media and Webbles

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Yuzuru Tanaka visiting Douglas Engelbart in his home in California in 2012. This friendship helped Engelbart heal his WW2 misgivings toward the Japanese.

Imagine if knowledge were not contained (only) in traditional books and articles on the one side, and in films and records and such on another – but in reconfigurable hypermedia, which one could cut and paste together at will and produce new hypermedia and new knowledge.

Engelbart called the enabling technology "open hyperdocument system", and demoed his own version in 1968. Meme Media and Webbles in effect turn the Web into an open hyperdocument system. Pieces of traditional webpages and Web services can be combined together – which opens a realm of creative opportunities. The purpose of meme media is to enhance the evolution of knowledge by allowing "cultural genes" or "memes" to cross-fertilize.

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Knowledge Gardening and TopicQuests

Imagine if instead of working each on our own project and article, we would be freely exchanging both questions and solution ideas continuously, as they emerge! Imagine if we all, globally, could in effect think and create together, as if we were sitting in the same room. Or better still – as if we were cells do 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 it was the collective intelligence that would make the difference that needs to be made.

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Empowering the young to co-create their future

The Game-Changing Game

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Choose an achievement or contribution! This image was shared as part of the announcement of our presentation of The Game-Changing Game at the Bay Area Future Salon in Palo Alto, in 2011.

Imagine you met a fairy... In our presentation at the San Francisco Bay Area Future Salon, we introduced The Game-Changing Game (a method for changing real-world systems) 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 to change real-life systems. There are two categories of 'players' – the Z-players are 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" – that is, by changing the systems of their profession, instead of merely trying to fit in.

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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...

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