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(Margaret Mead, Continuities in Cultural Evolution, 1964)

I am proposing a practical way to correct an error.

Problems—including non-sustainability of global trends and discontinuities in cultural evolution—need to be seen and treated as its consequences.

In his 1969 MIT report and call to action—to institute academic transdisciplinarity, as the necessary first step toward enabling the post-industrial society to take care of its problems—Erich Jantsch quoted Norbert Wiener, the iconic progenitor of cybernetics:

“There is only one quality more important than ‘know-how’…… This is ‘know-what’ by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.”

Academic disciplines cannot provide us the know-what; and the media informing, such as it is, won't do it either. A system that can empower us the people to act as our new situation demands must combine disciplinary and other evidence; it must transcend academic and cultural fragmentation; it must communicate to the public with the authority of science—in ways that are well beyond the modalities of outreach that the sciences have been able to produce.

I propose to institute a transdiscipline.

Which is a new kind of institution. And to make this proposal clear and concrete, I offer knowledge federation as a complete prototype of the transdiscipline—ready to be examined and put to use.

Knowledge federation is the result of work of quite a few excellent people.

The reason why I chose to plead its case like this, in first person, is to allow myself to be controversial and be personally accountable for what I say. And because I want this to be an outcry.

Historical appeals to institute transdisciplinarity remained ignored.

And when we took over the torch—or as the case might be this large boulder and began rolling it uphill—the same dynamic repeated itself. The challenge we are now facing is to be resolute in breaking the spell of business as usual—because because we have no time to waste.

This website is intended to complement my book called Liberation, which is about to appear in print; where I'll share sufficient details and evidence, rendered as entertaining brief stories called vignettes. Here I'll summarize knowledge federation's academic side, by outlining its structure; and letting you reconstruct its details by browsing through the book; and by participating in the public dialog the Libetion book will ignite. I'll let knowledge federation speak for itself; and thereby also illustrate some of its techniques.

• In Federation through Ideograms I'll explain the error that needs to be corrected and the gist of this proposal
• In Federation through Keywords I'll help you comprehend it precisely
• In Federation through Prototypes I'll make it more concrete by sharing some examples
• In Federation through Action I'll propose how to begin, and invite you to take part in this initiative.

Dino Karabeg