Science seems to be our only epsitemological process that lets us make sense about the world around us. Given the intellectual power of mankind over the centuries we have been able to use scientific method to gather an understanding of the world around us, things that we observe and others.
Any society's power is attached to it's advancement of natural sciences, engineering is based upon the discoveries in fundamental sciences, which are physics, chemistry, biology, plus mathematics (which is not a science).
Science and engineering has been perdominantly taught in academia, many places through centuries has been made to gather minds of their time (and mostly their place) in the form of an institute or university. giving them a place to work on their researches and giving lectures to the next generation. Academia has now become a property to distinguish advanced societies from other.
But some of the disadvantages of a classic academia lies beneath the spatial coordinates that they would have. In order to work with a professor at Harvard, you must be at Harvard. leaving true colaboration to be only possible for a few lucky ones.
Decentralization or decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision-making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group and given to smaller fractions within it. One of the main goals of Independent Society of Knowledge is to achieve decentralized academia, be it research programs between people from all over the world, or lectures accessible for people of the society.
We have the objective to make collaboration in science and between science and economy, easy, open, and better thatn before. Through designing platforms that would able The Knowledge Society to get their knowledge to the economy and use and upgrade latest technologies in the world to make better tools for scientists and engineers. We believe that decentralization makes a great impact on how science would progress in this century.
Computational science has gained more and more attention through the course of history, after the development of computers, and then personal computers, it seems reasonable to use computers as a first case study enviroment for scientific research. We build numerical methods that would help us solve different problems, as well as simulators that would bring us closer to efficient experiments in the LAB.
Despite the revolution in computers, it seems, from the perspective of scientific computations, that we are not using the best technologies available to us. This happened because of three main reasons:
- People in science do not easily start open-source projects because they believe in keeping the knowledge to themselves because that's what's distinguishes them from other people. This would cause a problem since a one-time-working code is sufficient for most computational researches.
- Many libraries that are being used for such researches are old. Written in C/C++, FORTRAN, which makes using them hard in todays frameworks and high-level programming languages.
- Libraries need team collaboration on a matter that would not necessarily be regarded as scientific work. Therefore scientists are mostly not doing such colaborations.
With these reasons it is hard to find scientists that would take their time and write, or evaluate the codes that has been written for scientific works. But we find this task to be necessary.
Firstly, there's a lot of work in these areas that has not been done, and if not, the problem with updating a code thtat has not been written clearly is dooming such libraries to be forgotten sometime in the future, despite the value they should have for scientists.
Second, having an open source community of scientific cmoputations would certainly benefit first and foremost the scientists in those areas.
We believe that academia should be accessible to individuals, to participate their own ideas and enthusiasm into it. It should be clear that economy and science has been helping each other through centuries, but the pay offs for science wasn't so great. In our opinion scientists who bring better understanding of the nature, or inventing devices that would power our economy, should gain from it. Be it better grants or better projects that they can work on. Science perdominantly is under the authority of academic, it has to change in order to be able to grow.
Independent Society of Knowledge, tries to achieve this goal, it do so by being decentralized, meaning that many participants from every corner of the world can colaborate in science, but at the same time, the sponsorships and grants can be sent directly to scientists and people working on the interested projects. This helps the economy have a first hand connection with scientific society for the first time.
There are three types of colaboration in ISK, (1) Directors, (2) Members, (3) Community. Directors are the people found by the society itself, that are thought to be able to handle the teamwork and the project as a whole. As an example assuming a project working on numerical analysis of general relativity, it certainly needs people, whose proficiency has been approved by the society that can handle evaluation of other members work. Or bringing new ideas to the table. In general the directors should present the bigger plan of the projects. A director can be chosen from Members or just by proposals.
Members are official community people who have been invited to be officially a member, this membership doesn't bring any more power than a community member, but it would evaluate your proposals and research programs more seriously.
Any enthusiast can colaborate on projects via the community membership. They are allowed to work on the subjects that seemes interesting to them, and probably to many others. Community membership is the open community of people that does not need any permission or invitation to join.
Anyone, regardless of their memebrship, or proficiency can propose research programs, lectures, seminars etc, to the society. We (the society) would consider all of the research areas, approving or disproving wouldn't be a matter for ISK, but instead it might be the case that the research is not considered good enough and the society would not accept it. After proposing a project, people would join the project, under you as the director. Other directors might aswell get in the project for a better result.
At the end let us give a simple definition of ISK.
Independent Society of Knowledge, is a decentralized, open, collaboration, of scientists from all over the world under the slogan One for All, All for Science.