The Knowledge Conference brings together leading thinkers and practitioners to examine knowledge infrastructure’s challenges and opportunities, and ultimately, to reimagine where it could take us.

Knowledge infrastructure exists all around us. It is made up of a broad set of social norms, institutions and systems that sit beneath and support the exchange of knowledge, spanning from public libraries, to school systems, to the Internet. This intricate infrastructure is essential to the creation and sharing of knowledge, to the functioning of our society and to our shared prosperity. Yet, despite its fundamental role in society, this knowledge infrastructure, much of it built hundreds of years ago, is often unexamined, neglected, or outright abused. While some facets of knowledge infrastructure are robust and innovative, others are fraying, insufficient and over-exploited.

At the Martin Prosperity Institute, we are interested in how knowledge infrastructure is created, maintained, and disrupted. Further, how does today’s knowledge infrastructure support our current and future needs? Ultimately, how we might purposefully design our knowledge infrastructure to be agile and perseverant in the face of the sweeping social, economic, and technological advances around us?