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Imagine...

A historical parallel

To understand the nature of our initiative, recall the humanity's condition at the eve of the Renaissance: devastating wars, horrifying epidemics, infamous Inquisition trials... Bring to mind the iconic image of Galilei in house prison, a century after Copernicus, whispering "eppur si muove" into his beard. The problems of the day were not resolved by focusing on those problems, but by a slow and steady development of a whole new approach to knowledge. Several centuries of unprecedented progress followed. Could a similar advent be in store for us today?

Our purpose is to connect the dots

"If I have seen further," Isaac Newton famously declared, "it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." What motivates our initiative is a discovery. We did not discover that the best insights of our best minds were drowning in an ocean of glut. A giant noticed that more than seven decades ago, and urged the scientists to focus on this disturbing development and find a remedy. But needless to say, his admonition too drowned in an ocean of glut.

... a quantum leap in our handling of knowledge

Our discovery

What we did find out, when we began to unearth and put together the best insights of our best minds, was that now just as in Newton's time, they compose a whole new approach to knowledge. We also found out that this new approach to knowledge leads to new answers to far-reaching questions – about the nature of truth and meaning; in what way might happiness be successfully pursued; what still impedes our freedom and democracy; what technological innovation may need to be like to benefit us far more than it presently does.

Our initiative

“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.” Hence we built knowledge federation as a model or a prototype of a new way to handle knowledge, which is capable of changing our condition.

The issue that is being proactively problematized on these pages is the way 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.

Our goal is not to make the traditional science obsolete, or to replace the ardent efforts that focus on specific issues such as the climate change, or on reaching "the millennium goals". Rather, it is to vastly increase the prospects of issue-oriented approaches to reach their goals.

See

Federation through Images

In Federation through Images we revisit our ideas about what constitutes "good" knowledge and "good" information. We show that the state of the art in science and philosophy requires change. We render the core insights of the giants in this traditionally abstract field as metaphorical and often paradoxical images called ideograms. The result is a cartoon-like introduction to the philosophical underpinnings of a refreshingly novel approach to knowledge – a way to empower knowledge to make a difference.

Federation through Stories

In Federation through Stories we point to some of the roots of an emerging larger Enlightenment-like and Industrial Revolution-like change. We use vignettes – short, lively, catchy, sticky... real-life people and situation stories – to explain and empower some of the core ideas of daring thinkers. A vignette liberates an insight from the language of a discipline and enables a non-expert to 'step into the shoes' of a leading thinker and 'look through his eye glasses'. By combining vignettes into threads, and by weaving threads into patterns and patterns into gestalts, we create a hierarchy of insights that can inform the handling of core practical issues including lifestyle, values, religion, innovation and governance.

Federation through Applications

In Federation through Applications we present knowledge federation as a creative frontier. About 40 prototypes cover a spectrum of creative directions, that together compose a complete single model or prototype, along with its proof of concept – of an approach to knowledge that suits our time.

Federation through Conversations

In Federation through Conversations we streamline our main course of action – the creation of real-life knowledge federation processes and infrastructures. The core technique is the dialog, which empowers change. Through public dialogs we create a public sphere capable of weaving new threads of thought. And we co-create social process and systemic structures capable of handling core issues in new ways.