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We talk about knowledge federation as an activity, a principle of social organization of knowledge creation and sharing, a movement, or as an academic discipline.
Activity
As an activity (here we talk about federating knowledge), knowledge federation may have several different meanings. We may be federating knowledge by creating some structure such as a topic map that will allow us to join and organize our fragmented knowledge resources. Another way might be by creating a community view based on a variety of individual opinions. We may, for example, think about producing an online Wikipedia-like document that reflects the consensus opinions of the world’s sociologists. Yet another possibility might be to create a federated document or even a piece of software from fragments of existing ones. This approach, called the ‘meme media’ has been developed by Professor Yuzuru Tanaka at the University of Hokaido. You may imagine, for example, that instead of creating a course compendium for the course you are teaching, you produce a large structure and invite the researchers worldwide to contribute their pieces where they feel best qualified. Naturally, those pieces would be allowed to change with time, as the knowledge advances.
Principle of social organization
As a principle of the social organization, knowledge federation is vaguely similar to democracy. Democracy too is not just a collection of technical solutions, such as the ballot, but also and above all an ethical stance and a set of principles. The values that characterize the knowledge federation are, Number One, that every individual author and opinion needs to be heard and recorded, without being overpowered or eliminated by the opinion of the majority. Here you may recall that we need to learn to think in a new way... We need to secure that new thinking will not be overpowered by the still dominant old one. The second value that characterizes knowledge federation is that we need to be able to synthesize a high-level view based on a variety of low-level ones, because that empowers us to act in synchrony, and to face the contemporary global condition in a coordinated way.
Initiative or movement
Democracy needed some organized action in order to become reality. In a similar way, Knowledge Federation may be understood as a project or a movement, whose goal is to develop all that is needed for the knowledge federation practice. But here we are of course not talking about an armed revolution, but about a revolutionary re-organization, and a revolution in awareness.
Academic field
Finally, we may talk about knowledge federation as an academic field. This field too will be organized as a federation. Researchers who participate in our project will not need to abandon their original identity and become professional ‘knowledge federators.’ Rather, experts from a variety of disciplines, such as the law and the sociology, which are needed for our project, will participate in the work of our group and contribute the relevant knowledge from their fields. In other words, we will all be federating our knowledge and our professional identities.
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