Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour

Rains from the sky a meteor shower

Of facts...they lie unquestioned,

Uncombined.

Wisdom enough to leach us of our ill

Is daily spun; but there exists no loom

To weave it into fabric.

– Edna St. Vincent Millay

Final Cause

I see nothing less than Global Thrivability as an Aristotelian Final Cause for Knowledge Federation as I sketch that concept here.

Background

For many years, I have been on a personal quest to be smart enough to solve problems in my life and to prevent them where possible. The inspiration for that quest was a visitation with a Leukemia, where, six years before my diagnosis, my father’s doctor told me that Leukemias don’t run in families. My father had it then. I had it later. What gives?

I needed to build a computer platform, which I called The Scholar’s Companion, which could mine the web for ideas and help me sort them out. Then I met Douglas Engelbart, who pointed out that the real game is the migration from me to us (I to We). Things clicked. At that very time in history, I met Steve Newcomb at an XML conference in San Jose California. Steve was running a formation meeting on something he called topic maps, specifically the migration from SGML topic maps, which he invented, to XML topic maps, which we were to co-create in the following years.

Later, I met Dino Karabeg and Sasha Rudan at a Topic Maps conference in Leipzig, 2007, where Dino and I realized that topic maps and the concept of knowledge federation went together. Dino did a masterful job of organizing our first conference in Dubrovnik in 2008, and has continued to shepherd such meetings ever since.

But, what is Knowledge Federation to me?

I am a tool builder with a need for those tools. Knowledge Federation, to me, is at once a platform specification and implementations, and a tribe, a gathering of people and their knowledge, to co-evolve not only their knowledge, but also the tools they use in the process, and their capabilities in relation to using that knowledge in the service of the Final Cause.

That vision is a restatement of Douglas Engelbart’s Dynamic Knowledge Repository (DKR): a combination of people, knowledge, and tools, all co-evolving to improve. When DKRs are networked together, you have Networked Improvement Communities (NICs).  All that as a knowledge federation.

When I was invited to give a talk about specific pedagogies in Seoul in 2007, just after the Leipzig meeting with Dino and Sasha, I planned to talk about DKRs in the context of life-long learning.  Ted Kahn read my paper and suggested swapping Dynamic Knowledge Garden for Dynamic Knowledge Repository. I did. The concept went over very well, except that they requested that I drop “Dynamic”. I now speak of Knowledge Gardening as a conceptual framework for doing knowledge federation in the context of improvement communities.

Strategy

Logically speaking, a goal I carry is based on the Final Cause, which entails wide and deep participation in knowledge gardening. A strategy is based on the simple notion of engaging large numbers of stakeholders in the processes that constitute knowledge gardening.

Tactics

Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has. –Margaret Mead

Tactical thinking necessarily orbits those known issues related to the entailed strategy, namely those social aspects of engaging large numbers of individuals in co-evolution of their tools, their knowledge, and their capabilities to apply both (think: herding cats).

Tactics therefore entail varieties of experiments related to the age-old tactic of divide and conquer which, in this context, means finding ways to break large sets of participants into smaller sets.

We can talk in many different ways about what that means; terms like “community of practice” come to mind, but a part of this tactic is to encourage those communities to form on their own in the context of specific kinds of reasons for forming and for performing.

When we have many different groups behaving as individual units, we have the equivalent of silos which form necessarily to preserve the social dynamics which are entailed in a performant community. Since a reason for being a silo in this context is not one of utter secrecy, our tactic is to think in terms of tools (platforms) which quite literally penetrate those silos explicitly for the purpose of federating their activities with others without disturbing any silo’s inherent ecosystem.

We recognize the entire space of a global DKR as that of a Complex Adaptive System (CAS); when we engage such a large ecosystem in smaller groups, we still have CAS instances, each its own ecosystem, but still connected within the surrounding ecosystem. We know from studies in systems and relational sciences that there exist in such ecosystems both actors and relations among those actors.  A CAS is thus treated, in our view, as a system in which relations take meanings far beyond simply knowing about all the actors. Actors relate among themselves, but they exist and also relate with elements of the environment. Knowledge Federation, in my view, thus seeks to tend all of those many relations as much as it seeks to catalog all of the actors.

We do that expressly to create an atmosphere (ecosystem) in which those actors, and their relations among each other, are conducive to their performance, which, in this context, is to discover and commit to the federation their understandings of complex issues which are posed to them as reasons to perform in their groups. That is, we are really maintaining a knowledge federation of those actors in the federation’s groups, and those actors and relations in the global ecosystem which are topics of discovery and conversation, the reasons for which discovery processes are commissioned.

A Knowledge Federation is a Complex Adaptive System studying Complex Adaptive Systems.

Consider the fact that we can take a living cell, lay it on a slide under a microscope, and we can tease out of it all the parts and count and study them. But, we cannot put that cell back together after dissecting it. It is dead. We lack an understanding of what makes something a living thing.

Thus, a tactical aspect of platform evolution is simply that of discovery and maintenance of the actor catalog along with discovery and maintenance of all knowable relations among them.

Extending that tactic, knowledge federation really is about discovery. Self-awareness, mindfulness by the actors is a first step; the overall tactic related to silo formation should encourage self-discovery. But, the process goes further. The tactic entails discovery of relations not presently known to actors of two distinct kinds:

• Those which already exist in the federated knowledge but which were not captured (represented)

• Those which exist in nature but which have not been discovered

I am saying here that a full-Monty knowledge federation, the social entity, is about satisfaction of the Final Cause, and that satisfaction entails looking at what others have seen, and seeing what was not seen before.