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The Athena design: Knowledge alliance and OWL
‘For any person, there are some things they know, and some things they don’t. What exactly is the difference? (Ichikawa and Steup, 2024, para. 1).
The nature of knowledge has been debated for thousands of years and there is no one universally agreed definition of knowledge. This author provides a pragmatism based definition: knowledge is our current, empirically justified, understanding of a subject.
We store data, we transmit it as information, we understand (empirically justified) information as knowledge, and we apply knowledge as wisdom for social benefit.
Athena design
[ah-thee-NAH]
The success of Pericles’ Athens (5th century B.C.) is attributed to the city’s organised management of dispersed knowledge (Chen, 2022). Athens, and this design, are named after the goddess of wisdom, Athena [ah-thee-NAH].
The Athena design has 6 design elements: professional development, design principles, technological infrastructure, operational structure, sustaining the design, policy recommendations.
The two main operational dimensions of the design are the Knowledge alliance which coordinates the knowledge networks (experiential knowledge), and the Operational Wisdom Library (OWL) providing the knowledge management and learning platform (recorded knowledge).
Below you can find links to the design principles, design benefits, policy recommendations, and the Knowledge Alliance and OWL provision.