People’s Knowledge Institute
Toward knowledge and wisdom for a life worth living
Partial, continually updated website content is consistent with the iterative nature of the organizational-development and partnership-building process. Despite the work-in-progress look of this space, you can confidently and swiftly connect with the founding team.
The People’s Knowledge Institute is a member-governed critical social learning commons, transformational research and design center, and a capacity-generating hub for knowledge democratization and civic innovation. Operated by the community for the community, it aims to improve people’s intellectual well-being and to cultivate the collective knowledge and wisdom crucial for leading a dignified, fulfilling, and sustainable life in a rapidly changing and complex world.The need for the PKI is clear from the cognitive harm, structural ignorance, and fragmentation of community spirit and collaboration proliferated by commodified systems of mass education and mainstream media captured by a neoliberal, market-driven ethos. The PKI seeks to restore individual and collective imagination and creativity from its degradation by a hegemonic socioeconomic order; to empower positive social change; to seek solutions to meet genuine community’s needs; and to harmonize existing knowledge regimes in support of just, emancipatory sustainability transitions.
PKI as a knowledge garden
Think of the People’s Knowledge Institute as a garden. It is planted and collaboratively tended by knowledge gardeners and technology stewards from diverse local communities who are motivated by their shared desire to cultivate—even in the face of adversity—a thriving learning ecosystem capable of producing fruits of wisdom for intellectual nourishment and social liberation of the community’s present and future generations. This community of plants interacts and supports the mutual flourishing of each other and the garden as a whole.
Are all types of “plants” welcome in our knowledge garden?
In line with our integrated and holistic approach to cultivating knowledge and wisdom, we will prevent “weeds” from growing in our garden, i.e. those forms and modes of knowledge production and application that seek to harm or exclude other “plants” in the garden; that seek to dominate and reduce the diversity of the garden and the ways to cultivate it; to constrain the imagination and creativity of gardeners; that seek to divide and pit gardeners against each other as to the purpose or needs of the garden for the community; to weaken the ability of gardeners to fully participate in making decisions and caring for the garden; to rationalize or normalize injustice, inequality, and exclusion of plants and gardeners; or that are driven by short-term and simplistic ends in disregard of the complex nature of a garden’s purposes and functions and the need to sustain a healthy, thriving garden for the community over generations.
Who are we?
We are part of a comprehensive, steadily growing international movement dedicated to knowledge democratization and social innovation. We are educators, researchers, librarians, museum curators, public servants, civil society activists, joined and aided by partners from other sectors and walks of life. We are committed to the altruistic, socially responsible, and impactful application of our individual and collective intelligence through robust critical social learning processes and programs of transformational inquiry toward cultivating integral and holistic knowledge, active wisdom, and higher-order competencies that match the grand challenges of sustainability transformation and transition to a post-capitalist ecological civilization and strong democracy.
Why is PKI organized as a knowledge commons?
We recognize the outstanding potential of the theory and design principles of knowledge commons advanced by the Nobel-prize-winning work of Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues. We are inspired by growing evidence of successful applications and adaptations of the commons framework worldwide to a multitude of collective-interest endeavors in various operational fields and uses.Organized as commons, these innovative economic, social, educational, cultural, and other enterprises benefit from shared, mindful, and responsible governance of collective resources and community-designed and governed protections against commodification, enclosure, cognitive capture, moral corruption, and colonization by destructive forces of neoliberal capitalism and market fundamentalism. These political-economic and socio-cultural advantages of the commons architecture allow us to confidently rely on it in developing PKI itself and a variety of public-benefit projects and endeavors that PKI will seek to advance.
Does the bell toll for you?
We are looking for knowledge gardeners of all types: students, academics and subject-matter experts, professionals, civic leaders, cultural practitioners, businesses, nonprofits, public institutions, government agencies, public-benefit foundations, and philanthropists. Your active participation as a knowledge gardener is always welcome, but your material inputs also help our garden grow. In-kind contributions of space or supplies for meetings, networks and communications to like-minded community members, collaboration in community knowledge-building garden projects are all much appreciated. And, yes, your financial support is also needed to help our garden grow and thrive. We have a separate document that offers ways and levels of support you can provide.
Together for the future
PKI will seek to minimize its physical footprint while maximizing the effects of its social-learning outreach through carefully designed partnerships that will allow leveraging existing infrastructure. Think of our programmatic streams’ architecture as a corrective, optimizing meta-layer deployed over fragmented institutional terrain and engineered through symbiotic relationships with partners who realize the inadequacy of their individual efforts relative to the purpose and magnitude of Hawaiʻi’s deep green transformation.We hope that our relentless pursuit of truly synergistic, correct-by-design collaborations and expressed commitment to synthesizing the best intellectual achievements of emancipatory inquiry and most effective forms of concerted action will contribute to remedying many of the seemingly irreparable rifts, mutual suspicions, disempowering fragmentation, and other kinds of tribalistic behaviors that may unwittingly support neoliberalism’s divide-and-rule MO and prevent genuine social change from occurring in our land.When we say “human survival is not a solo act,” we call for a moment of reflection and epistemic vigilance by individuals and groups who may be blinded to the limited (and possibly counterproductive) effects of their most commendable but siloed action. Do we want even our hard-won tactical victories to be casually overridden by the system in place? If not, we need to think and act together to cultivate forms of collective, complex-thought-guided action intelligence that are fit for our purpose.
What’s growing on?
A good knowledge garden, much like a real one, cannot be grown overnight. Selection of good seeds, cultivation of fertile soil, application of the right fertilizer, sufficient irrigation, and elimination of weeds are tasks equally important for knowledge gardening. However, starting some knowledge-growing nurseries in 2017 allows some fruits of our knowledge labor to be harvested sooner than others that have yet to be planted and grown collaboratively with fellow local as well as visiting gardeners from lands near and far.To be in the know regarding upcoming activities, please check out the programs and events calendar on our website and sign up to receive news updates on our knowledge-gardening initiative. You are also welcome to join the next “What’s growing on?” monthly mixer, where you can meet with our gardeners and their supporters and learn what and how you can contribute to this collaborative effort
To the beginning
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People’s Knowledge Institute
PO Box 2951, Honolulu, HI 96802 | t 808.657.3555 | f 808.825.5920 | pki@imua.cc
This digital space is dedicated to a living civic-innovation and knowledge-democratization venture named “People’s Knowledge Institute” (PKI).Partial, continually updated website content is consistent with the iterative nature of the organizational-development and partnership-building process. Despite the work-in-progress look of this space, you can confidently and swiftly connect with the founding team via email or phone with your requests or suggestions.