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Contents
- 1 – If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
- 2 – 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.
- 3 – The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future.
- 4 – To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
- 5 See
- 6
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- 8
– 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 vastly and increasingly powerful communication technology and its 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 how 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. By developing and showcasing knowledge federation we undertake to:
- Demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that a radically better alternative is possible
- Streamline the co-creation, real-life deployment and scaling, and continued evolution of radically better alternatives
In each of the first three main four modules of this website we illuminate the knowledge federation alternative 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 – including its real-life implementation, deployment and growth and scaling.