UF Welcome note

Imagine that you are interested in the climate change or, more concretely, the question 'Is the climate change a sign that the human civilization is able to influence the planetary system to such degree that it has become necessary for us to radically modify our habitual patterns?'. You have in your hands the book “The Vanishing Face of Gaia - A Final Warning” by James Lovelock, in which the answer to your question is vehemently affirmative. But as you are reading, you realize that you cannot even be sure whether Lovelock still has the same opinion as at the time of writing. Perhaps new evidence has compelled him to change his opinion? At the same time, you are rightly convinced that there are authors who counter-argue and deny Lovelock’s conclusions.

Paradoxically, the more knowledge we have about a subject, under the present form of organization, the more difficult it becomes to assemble and digest the relevant insights and form an opinion.

To see the large picture in which knowledge federation finds its niche and its reason for existence, think of us knowledge workers as cells in the global brain. Our critical task is to provide vision, understanding and creative action plans to a social organism imperiled by risks. A moment of reflection will reveal that the way we are organized in handling this task leaves abundant room for improvement. As we have just seen, the organization of the results of our work can be improved. Furthermore, the way we are organized in performing our task can also be improved. The researchers (whose task is to create new knowledge) tend to limit their attention to specialized questions within their discipline, and confide their findings to their colleagues in the vernacular of a specialization. The journalists (whose task is to bring the relevant impulses to people) tend to focus on sensations that attract the readers' attention.

Commenting on the fragmentation of the field of sociology, in 1991, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu observed that “a transformation of the social organization of scientific production and circulation and, in particular , of the forms of communication and exchange through which logical and empirical control is carried” could lead sociology to greatest progress. The brief argument we have just presented suggests that the same observation mayalso be made about the global knowledge production as a whole.

These uncommonly large opportunities for improvement have of course not remained unnoticed, and several large initiatives with corresponding technical solutions have been developed to produce remedial trends. The semantic web and the topic maps technologies offer methods and tools for organizing and accessing the available knowledge artifacts according to their meaning, and in a subject centric way. Dialogue mapping and sense making tools allow for structuring discourse and cohering conclusions. The collective intelligence, which for several decades remained Doug Engelbart’s lonely battle cry, has recently become a household term and a large and growing field of action. And Wikipedia has shown that the technology now makes it possible for a community of people, and for the global community, to co-create documents.

In the shadow of this impressive technical progress, however, the practice – in the sciences, in education, and in the media – has largely remained unchanged. The adoption of some of the key technologies, such as the semantic web and the topic maps, has been reported as slow (REF). And Wikipedia, while providing a way to co-create a single, consensual document on a given subject, has been deemed as unsuitable for publishing new results by its creator (REF), and as “disintermediating the expert” (and by implication also the university as the source of socially sanctioned expertise) by its critic (REF).

Seeking to find the key impediment to a remedial change of practice, we readily find it – in the practice itself! To see it, imagine yourself in the situation of a typical journalist or academic researcher. Pressed by deadlines and busy schedules, would you be ready to reassess and reconfigure your routine ways of working? Would you, indeed, even be likely to find out about the remedial tools that the technology people are offering? Remember that we are living in the world where the knowledge workers are working in 'silos' (that being the very problem we are aiming to solve). We must seriously reckon with the risk that the scientist and the journalists might remain unreachable in their silos, with names like 'polymer chemistry' and 'solid state physics' or 'Daily Mirror'. The researchers interested in ‘semantic web’ and ‘collective intelligence’ would then have no other option but to create their own silos.

We welcome you to knowledge federation, a cross-disciplinary initiative whose purpose is to evolve a new knowledge creation and sharing practice, or better said, a variety of new practices. Once they are implemented, those practices will be available for testing, critique, modification and adoption.

You may imagine the knowledge federation community as a collection of global brain cells united by a shared goal of accelerated structural evolution. As the rest of this document will explain, we are developing an infrastructure and a space – conceptual, physical, academic and technical – where such evolution can readily take place. If you share some of our sensibilities, and you feel resonance with our projected goal, you are welcome to join us. By becoming part of this commjunity, you will not be expected to abandon your native professional community and identity and assume a new one, on the contrary. What we are creating is a federation – a collection of professionals united by a shared purpose, each bringing to it the relevant insights and expertise from our own profession, while preserving our original commitments and identities.

In what follows we provide a description of knowledge federation as we currently envision it, explain our current goals and strategies, but we do not provide a definition. A reason is that we want to allow each of us, and everyone else, to attribute to ‘knowledge federation’ a somewhat different meaning, according to personal preferences and needs. We also want to allow our shared concept of knowledge federation to evolve as our knowledge improves. Or in one word, we want to notion of ‘knowledge federation’ itself to be federated.

The notion of knowledge federation

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines federation as:

1 : an encompassing political or societal entity formed by uniting smaller or more localized entities: as a : a federal government b : a union of organizations 2 : the act of creating or becoming a federation; especially : the forming of a federal union

If ‘knowledge federation’ should remind you of the political federation, that is not without reason. If you imagine the knowledge artifacts, the individual insights or the positions in a debate as states, then the global or the community position or state of knowledge may be imagined as a federation of those states. And if you imagine knowledge-making professions and professionals as states, then a knowledge federation will be a suitable name for the form of organization that unites them around a shared task while allowing them to preserve their autonomy and identity.

A question that immediately arises is – What should this new organization be like? Shall we simply assemble together the documents that talk about the same subject (there might be millions of them)? Or shall we create a single shared document as Wikipedia does (and sacrifice authorship, accountability and diversity of opinions)? As the political federation aims to resolve the tension between the individual and the shared interests and identities by ideally turning the conflict of interests into synergy, the knowledge federation takes the same challenge in the domain of knowledge creation and sharing. We assume the position that the complete separation and complete unification are just two extreme points in a continuum, indeed in a whole space of possible solutions, and we undertake to explore that space, and to develop combined solutions, the ones where the advantages of independent identities are combined with the advantages of synthesis and sharing.

Like the political federation (and also the related concept ‘democracy’), the knowledge federation is not only a form of social organization, but also and indeed above all a set of values and principles. It is on the bases of those principles that various concrete social organizations emerge and evolve, in accord with the local cultural and other circumstances. Hence one of the key roles of our community will be to evolve a value system associated with knowledge federation, and based on it, a collection of principles and manners of conduct.

Knowledge federation principles and values

We challenge (as no longer true) the assumption, immanent in much of our academic and media practice, and even in our language and common sense, that something is ‘known’ when it is published in an academic or other publication. We consider it indeed as an inherent, and arguably central part of the purpose of every knowledge-making community to integrate and assimilate the fragmented pieces of knowledge in their domain, and to make them available, in a truest sense of that word, to the larger community. We consider it unethical (should we say ‘a form of mental or cultural pollution’) to just publish volumes of work and abandon the task of sorting out the mess and drawing conclusion to the rest of us.

We also challenge the age-old and now discredited idea (REF) that the purpose of knowledge making is to provide an exact or ‘true’ representation of reality, according to which every piece of information may be evaluated by a single bit of information with states ‘true’ and ‘false’ Rather, we assume the position that there exist a multitude of possible criteria by which knowledge artifacts can be evaluated, and that in a changing world, multiple criteria need to be represented and multiple voices heard. At the same time, this needs to be done without compromising the quality and the rigor, the time-tested marks of academic information. You will easily notice that the challenge of reconciling these seemingly contradictory requirements (for representing multiple opinions, multiple value criteria etc., and at the same time providing rigorous quality standards where the best can prevail) is a suitable task for a federated organization,

Based on the the mentioned considerations, we formulate the following two principles or value criteria:

Preservation. According to this value, every piece of knowledge has the right to exist. We do not discriminate, not even on the basis of veracity. When practicing the principle of preservation, we assume the attitude of a good librarian, whose professional ethics forbid him to discard a document based on personal taste or opinion.

Federation. Individual pieces and artifacts are no longer sufficient. Social processes are required, and need to be carefully developed and enacted, along with supporting technology, by which the critical forms of knowledge can be combined together to create time-critical and needed new forms of meaning and solutions. In the spirit of ‘pragmatic web’, we consider the creation of affordances and examples that facilitate those central social processes as a key element of our mission.

Our strategy

Aiming to facilitate the change of practice, and create synergy with the existing related efforts in this direction, we undertake to supply whatever is missing but needed.

We find a natural way to follow the above strategy in focusing on the development of one or several whole solutions, that may easily be applied in practice.

Our strategy is simple – to evolve and implement completely different ways of working together (creating, organizing and communicating knowledge), under the shared name ‘knowledge federation’ and under an associated set of principles. We want to evolve complete instances of solutions, including both the technical tools and suitable social organization. These solutions can then be studied, improved and implemented in wider practice.

We take up the challenge of evolving a system or multiple systems for knowledge federation and sharing, on a very high level, including both the technology and the social processes.

While bringing together, comparing and combining (or federating) various technical solutions will remain our core task, we increasingly develop our community as a federation of professionals from diverse disciplines, sharing their knowledge while aiming to benefit the shared goal of developing a federation, while at the same time benefiting the developments in their own specialties.

We evolve an instance of a knowledge federation community, where a variety of stake holders (researchers, journalists, technology developers and vendors, publishers...) participate internationally while preserving their disciplinary and personal identity.

We create also a knowledge federation conference, web tools and and publications, as well as a knowledge federation course, federated internationally.

Our ultimate task is to affect the common practice, and by doing that facilitate a substantial improvement - adoption of technology, augmentation of everyone’s effect in knowledge sharing. To overcome the main obstacle - the obvious resistance and inertia of the large system to change - we point at the resemblance of our strategy with the way in which large changes indeed do happen in biological evolution – the so-called punctuated equilibrium theory. The essential message here is that evolution does not make jumps, because the resistance to change or ‘homeostasis’ of the large system. Substantial evolutionary change becomes possible, however, when a fraction of a population becomes isolated ‘at the periphery of the ancestral range’ [REF]. The changes that are evolved there can then be placed back and, by virtue of their better organization, prevail in the large system and make an impact.

The biological evolution as metaphor, however, comes short of representing other advantages of our strategy, stemming from the fact that we are not just spontaneously evolving a federated solution, but intentionally a complex functional whole, with all the necessary functional elements (this indeed is the main focus of our strategy). To represent this main aspect of our project, imagine that we are creating a model of a vehicle. Call it an fed-mobile, and think of it as a new solar-powered transportation system that combines the advantages of an auto-mobile with the advantages of public transportation.

By designing the whole federation, bringing people together, we open up to a number of specific advantages and synergies to develop.

Adoption of technology

Think of the technology such as topic maps or semantic web as part of a solution in a very large system (our ‘fed-mobile’). The complete system may need to involve not only other technologies (Wikis etc.) but also procedures, and even evaluation of academic work (peer reviews won’t work, they do not recognize the work with the organization etc. seems like waste of time, we address this in a moment.

So from the point of view of adoption of technology, and our car metaphor, we may think of existing technologies as car manufacturers putting on the market a carburator, an engine, a steering system... produced by different vendors, who not only do not communicate with one another to make their components inter-operable (they too live in silos!) - indeed, they have no idea about what the whole vehicle is going to look like, and whether anything else may be needed to complete it!

Even this is not completely accurate. A car is a one-person vehicle (an auto-mobile). A system for production and sharing of knowledge involves very many people, and as such, is not something that a single person can possibly construct, even if one would want to.

Conversely, is conceivable that if the education and the knowledge production should be coordinated in completely different ways using the technology, then the rate of adoption of this technology could be substantially larger!

Business

Imagine that you are a business researcher or an entrepreneur, looking for an interesting new theme to explore, or a lucrative course of entrepreneurial action. This community would offer you a unique access to new thinking and new technology. And field of action is potentially vast - we are talking about a de-facto re-creation of existing patterns of publishing and sharing Would you not like to talk to the technology people who are working on the fore-front, and develop business models that can take advantage of the technoloogy they produce. Conversely, your contribution will be most welcome - the new technology will need suitable business models if it should enter the practical reality.

Or to think of this in the context of the fed-mobile metaphor: A variety of types of expertise are needed, and they all benefit from one another, in the context of the larger whole they are creating.

Similar synergies exist with art and design, legal,

Development of technology

Once we have a functioning model of a fed-mobile, we can develop a suitable tire industry. Without the fed-mobile, this industry would have no reason for existence. With the fed-mobile in place, it can be a new and lucrative line of business.

Furthermore, we can create new technologies, which within the new system have a role, and in the existing one have no market or interest.

In our research project we anticipate a number of such building blocks, and we develop them in cooperation. An example is the value matrix object, as explained further below.

Evaluation of knowledge artifacts and knowledge workers

In addition to organizing the knowledge artifacts in a ‘subject-centric way’ and thereby making them accessible, we will have to distinguish between the knowledge artifacts that are useful in a particular search from the ones that are less useful.

To that end we develop a building block in our system called value matrix object. The idea is, simply, that this object should accumulate or federate all available information about the value of the object throughout the lifetime of this object.

Philosophically, this allows us to depart from the T/F or Y/N paradigm and look into finer gradation - knowledge is fuzzy.

In a scientific publishing, for example, this would mean that the peer reviewers not only say yes or no, but potentially also place their detailed and possibly authored opinion into the value matrix (this may or may not be visible to the author). Later also - the number the article is accessed, or referenced, and in what way, the opinions of all the readers - everything is accumulated and everything counts. Also the artifact is evaluated according to a variety of criteria. And of course - the disagreements with what is written, with pointers to counter-arguments, are recorded.

This affords several advantages.

Articles can be evaluated according to multiple criteria and given to user on demand. The user can fine-tune the criteria. So nothing is really thrown away. And yet there is no overload. Mechanisms are constructed for new insights to become more visible, and make their way against the overload of published volume. Researchers are evaluated according to multiple criteria. A world-changing insight may take long reflection and risk taking. Organizing knowledge and creating big-picture views may be time consuming. Researchers are unlikely to engage unless this is recognized. The value matrix makes this recognition possible.

Career promotion can be done according to differentiated criteria. Some people are good at volume. Others will produce a substantial work, one in several years. Some are organizers. Every kind of contribution to the common knowledge counts, as it should be. A concrete university may choose the profile they want to employ (do a search in the researcher value matrix...).

Notice that the value matrix is like a part in an automobile: Its use and value depends on the existence of a larger whole, including the social processes and values that support its use.

Education

Education is an example pointing at the fact that the spontaneous evolution of technology does not necessarily contribute to the global brain in the best possible way. The school and the teachers and textbook writers were not as well positioned to take advantage of the new technology as the games industry was. A consequence is that the kids are now playing computer games when they should be studying.

We create a federated course. Initially it will be our own, knowledge federation course. Everyone in the world contributes.

When someone is there only to make one lecture, within a federated organization, then field experts can team up with animators, creators of online games etc. to create state-of-the-art technology that is just incredible fun to work with. This is the economies of scale and concentration of resources logic. Educators are not producing quantity, but quality.

Furthermore, education is an unused resource. Think about all the good effort that is wasted on homeworks and evaluations - just to result in a grade! We make education active and participatory - everyone is part of the federation. Students can be like backteria and worms - composting the raw material, extracting nutrients. By participating, they learn to contribute. Our culture will require people who can participate and take responsibility, not homework doers. Highly evaluated student work can acquire recognition, and make both the student and the work more visible. An ecosystem.

Again notice that this depends on having the rest of the federation in place.

An initial, non-federated run of this course was done at UiO in Spring 2009. We intend to stage the full international course in Dubrovnik in Fall 2011.

Research methodology

One half-century ago the first computers appeared on the market and computer science was developed as an academic discipline, to supply the expertise and the experts that this new technology required. Now again there is a new technology - the Web and the related communication media. This new technology is also in a certain sense programmable, since it includes programmable machines and intelligent human actors. But the resulting ‘programs’ are key societal processes, of which we have here discussed one example (creating and sharing knowledge). Developing suitable theory and practice of such ‘programming’ will be of prime importance. Wikipedia and Google have shown that a team of technical people can create, and possibly also acquire, enormous power simply by creating a certain tool and putting it on the Web. Creating academically sound, and socially accountable counterparts should be a task ranking high on the academic agenda.

Thomas Erickson writes in the recently issued Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems (pointing at differences between this new kind of design and conventional design):

But socio-technical design is not just about designing things, it is about designing things that participate in complex systems that have both social and technical aspects. Furthermore, these systems and the activities they support are distributed across time and space [and] in constant flux. [...] this complexity raises a number of general questions that socio-technical systems designers will need to address. First of all, how do we represent such systems? How do we cast a complex system into a material form in such a way that we can reflect on it? [...] how do we carry out reflective conversations with them? How will we go about ensuring that we ask the right questions, from the right perspectives, in the right contexts? Perhaps, taking a cue from participatory design (e.g., Greenbaum and Kyng, 1991), we will need to greatly expand the range of participants involved in the reflective processes, which in turn may require developing new sorts of design artifacts to aid in participatory reflection.[...] how do we ensure that eventually we converge? Or do we? Perhaps the notion that the end result of a design process is a stable product is old-fashioned. Perhaps we’re headed towards a future of ‘permanent beta,’ in which things are designed so that their design may continue during use, where the leading edge of design resides not with the producers but with the users. [...] However things turn out, it seems clear that socio-technical design will require new methods, new tools, new participants, and new practices.

We submit knowledge federation as a form of organization that may be suitable for socio-technical design research.

By developing our knowledge federation, we also aim to contribute to the development of methodology for socio-technical design research.

History and status

Our initiative began in October 2007 on the Topic Maps Research and Applications conference in Leipzig, where several of us came together having found out that we were working on a similar agenda. Googling ‘knowledge federation’ (the name we chose for our initiative) readily led to Professor Yuzuru Tanaka from University of Hokaido as our precursor, so he too was invited to join us, as well as several other colleagues who we knew resonated with our interest. We developed a Mediawiki-based website as an initial tool for our collaboration [REF] and started a discussion forum [REF]. On October 20-22, 2008 we had our first conference at the Inter-University Centre Dubrovnik, Croatia [REF]. The first two days we presented articles explaining everyone’s work and ideas. The third and last day was dedicated to federating our ideas about knowledge federation.

Immediately after the conference we made a symbolic federation move – we contacted Drago Pilsel, a reuted Croatian journalist, and he wrote an article about knowledge federation in Croatian Novi List.

During the Spring semester 2009 an initial knowledge federation course was held at University of Oslo Computer Science Department, as a precursor to our planned globally federated course.

Our second conference is scheduled for 3-6 October, 2010. The federated knowledge federation course is scheduled to begin in Inter University Centre Dubrovnik in 2011.

At present we are developing an initial tool set to be used by our initiative.

The Inter University Centre Dubrovnik offers a suitable venue for our initiative. Started in 1972 by Professor Ivan Supek, Croatian University Rector and reputed physicist and humanist, the Centre initially served as a place where scientists and thinkers from the (political) East and West could come and exchange (or should we say federate) their ideas (Yugoslavia then was one of the few countries to which Eastern-block residents could travel). Subsequently a number of leading thinkers including xx and yy offered seminars. The centre now stages conferences, and gives accredited courses to students from its member institutions, which include some of the largest and most reputed universities world wide. The thirtieth anniversary booklet emphasized “the urgent need for a fresh approach to curriculum development under requirements posed by a globalized society and young peoples’ wish to master new and rapidly changing social, economic, and political conditions through adequate educational schemes” (REF).

We intend to keep the Dubrovnik meetings small. It is like a Platonic Academy - keep the creative spark and close, relaxed social contacts. Also have the right social dynamic. We do everything that is needed to create a suitable situation for people to meet and exchange ideas. Dubrovnik with its beauty and the ambients we chose serve as catalysts for social interaction.

REFERENCES

[x] Knowledge Federation 2008 Photo Journal. http://folk.uio.no/dino/KF/KF08Photos/KF08/Photos.html ... [z] Thomas Erickson: Socio-Technical Design. In Brian Whitworth and Aldo deMoor (Eds.): Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems. Hershey, New York, 2009. pp. 334 -335. http://www.visi.com/%7Esnowfall/ST_Design_Intro.pdf

http://www.iuc.hr/IucAdmin/Server/downloads/beyond.pdf

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