The next two chapters will conclude our brief survey of the rich, important, and complex domain of Global Foresight. We will now briefly discuss two particularly useful open foresight platforms that we at Foresight University would like to see and help emerge in coming years. Consider these pages a humble effort to call for social entrepreneurs to develop those platforms. If you would like to fund or get involved in the development of either platform, please let us know, we’d love to talk.

This Chapter, Trends and Progress, begins with a sketch of Futurepedia, a proposed platform to aggregate crowd stories in Probable, Possible, Preferred and Preventable futures (aka Knowns, Unknowns, Visions, and Risks – the KUVR assessments), culminating, for each issue discussed, on tentative definitions, models, visions, and evidence of social progress. The next chapter, Startup Ideas, offers a similar sketch of Idea Hub, is a proposed global platform for listing, improving, evaluating and better communicating good ideas for addressing global and local problems, with both proprietary and public domain product, service, law, policy, and project ideas, again as an aid to social entrepreneurs.

We think both of these are particularly needed platforms in global foresight.

4U’s Futurepedia Vision: Envisioning Social Progress

Global foresight needs a few leading, globally recognized platforms that do their best to aggregate the wisdom of foresighted crowds on a vast number of future-important topics, culminating, for each topic discussed, in shared and competing visions of social progress.

The platform we are envisioning would be called Futurepedia, and run by a nonprofit organization. Futurepedia would cover a topic that Wikipedia traditionally hasn’t allowed: structured thinking and writing about the future, in every topic people care about. Because Wikipedia’s editors consider such efforts speculative, good thinking on the future doesn’t make it into their wiki, in general. So developing a good Futurepedia is a very important service for humanity that is waiting to be addressed by an independent organization with a deep commitment to foresight thinking.

In 2005, sci-fi author and futurist David Brin called for the emergence of a Predictions Registry, a global platform to record predictions by industry and subject area, with social rewards to those who are particularly successful. That same year I publicly presented the vision of a Futurepedia at ASF’s Accelerating Change 2005 conference, as a mediawiki platform like Wikipedia, and invited someone in our ASF community to fund it’s start. We reserved the domain Futurepedia.org for that purpose in 2006, and I wrote it up at the FERNweb.org website in 2007. The futurists Michelle Bowman and Kevin Kelly independently called for a Futurepedia, using the same name, in 2008. I asked for $250K as a minimum to start the project in 2005, and I still think we could start a good one with such funds. Such a platform will eventually be developed, but it may not be developed with good foresight process, and with a democratic body of academically trained foresight practitioners using an open source governance approach, which we think would maximize inclusion and trust.

Once it was sufficiently developed, a good Futurepedia could raise funds annually from its user community, like Wikipedia, and it could use other crowd-benefiting business models that would grow the platform. It might even adopt Media Co-Operative model for the nonprofit, or launch it as a social benefit corporation, giving back a fraction of annual income to all contributors, based on reputation.

In addition to being a good wiki, a good Futurepedia should have polling and argument mapping features, and a bevy of AI-assistance tools to help folks do online research, get feedback, and do futures mapping. Ideally the page structure would always include a particularly well grounded foresight model like the Four Ps (picture right). It could also encourage writers to use other classic models (Sharpe’s Three Horizons, Dator’s Four Futures, etc.), and enable insights, at a minimum, in science, technology, environmental, economic, political, cultural, organizational, and personal (STEEPCOP) domains.

Some early efforts toward the Futurepedia vision exist today, such as the Forwiki for futures practices and Future.wikia.com. But none of these have strong funding or business models, and none have achieved the scale and scope we envision. There are also a number of great for-profit online foresight and prediction platforms that are party related to the Futurepedia vision, and would be excellent technology and strategic partners for the project. See our Online Platforms page in Appendix 3 for some examples.

All the existing online foresight work that is CC-licensed needs to be brought into a larger nonprofit project with this kind of global scope and ambition, with good management and a business model. It just needs a visionary funder, and a practitioner team to commit to its development and management in its early years. After a few years of good growth, it will become a free and commonly used global resource, just as Wikipedia is today.

We’ve seen a good start at the social progress aspect of the Futurepedia vision with Kevin Kelly’s lovely website, HumanProgress.org, which charts a growing variety of progress trends and achievements to date.  Please consider funding or joining their team to further their vision for their site. While I love HumanProgress.org, I think we need to go much further, and ideally, much faster, in building a crowd-driven foresight community around probable, possible, and preferable global futures.

Again, let us know if you’d like to fund or lead this initiative, or tell us about an existing one that has these features, so we can join it.

For those who want more detail, here are a few additional thoughts on what a good Futurepedia might entail. I’d love to hear yours as well.

Project Details

All material would be shared in a Creative Commons share-alike license. We can crowdfund short, 3-minute Summary Videos, for the top of the most popular pages, to help the site become more accessible for for youth and lay audiences.

As in Scholarpedia, a useful alternative to Wikipedia, the Top Section of each page, perhaps one printed page long, might be written by a relevant foresight scholar who takes personal responsibility for curating that page, perhaps for many years. The Top Section would include links to good online pages on the history and present status of the topic. As the topic research grows, this section could link to number of slightly longer (5 pages or less) Summary Articles on the possible, probable, and preferable futures of the topic, with one of these potentially written by the curating scholar.

The Top Section and Summary Article might be written in Schools of Thought (SoT) format, where each major SoT is described in a few summary paragraphs, referencing some of the leading thinkers advancing the school, and some of their supporting publications. These sections would  be anonymously peer-reviewed for reliability and  be citable as peer-reviewed publications, and continually revised and improved, as with any wiki page.

As in Wikipedia, which is by far the largest and most valuable of the online encyclopedias, the remaining sections of every page will be publicly editable by anyone who creates a RealName account, to capture the collective foresight of our global community of professional and lay foresight thinkers.

Affiliation of this wiki with APF, WFS, WFSF, UN, and other leading foresight organizations and think tanks, as well as all the graduate foresight programs, would be ideal.

In the long run, a well-developed Futurepedia might have the following sections, among others:

1. Encyclopedia. Outlines of discussions on Four Ps Futures over a wide range of topical domains.
2. Polling/Delphi/Prediction Market. Tools for capturing the collective wisdom of the Futurepedia-using crowd.
3. Education. Links to frameworks, courses, and resources for professionals seeking foresight education.
4. Research. Links to pre-print communities, methods, and tools used by professionals in foresight research.
5. Employment. Links to and descriptions of foresight employers and jobs available in major cities around the world.

Fundraising and Volunteering Needs

Again, I think the launch of such a platform would require either a substantial resources commitment, or a substantial number of volunteers willing to work hard for several years to get this lovely platform up to a significant size (5,000 pages or more), at which point it should be significant enough to be become a trusted platform for future-thinkers, and its growth will become increasingly self-sustaining. Are you interested in Sponsoring, Volunteering or Fundraising for this worthy project? If so, email us, we’d love to talk.

June 2024 Update:

We are presently in talks with the APF, who is now planning to launch a Futures Wiki under the guidance of APF Board Member Zan Chandler, about joining their team and offering our Futurepedia brand and design work to them, in the hope that some of it will be adopted by their thriving global community. Great ideas eventually emerge!

Let’s turn now to technology foresight, and a starter overview of current trends and progressive futures in ten important domains of technology change. We look forward to seeing these brief overviews expanded and improved in a thriving Futurepedia platform in coming years.