Author: José Ramos

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The (evolving…) Futures of Power in the Network Era

As Edward Snowden spends yet another night in the limbo of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport (as I write this), one flight away from returning to his homeland to be drawn and quartered, one flight away from potential asylum with a country ready to risk the wrath of Imperium, and Julian Assange remains holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London one step away from a US Grand Jury, it is indeed a good time to reflect on the evolving nature of power in the modern world.

Contemporary societies are undergoing fundamental transformations and disruptions related to the emergence of the network form. Following on the back of my thesis work, my interest in the circulation of power, and the evolution of power in the modern era,  still incomplete…  I wanted a way to understand and articulate how the network form transforms and disrupts power dynamics, and to tease out some of the emerging threats, opportunities and strategic issues that we are all facing.

The culmination of this is an article in the Journal of Futures Studies titled “The futures of power in the network era“.  It is an exploration and analysis of evolving power dynamics related to the network form across two critical axes of change: network politics and network economics. As such it is a kind of futures oriented exploration of political economy, with the emphasis squarely on the influence and dynamics of the network form.

More critically, I posit 2 struggles for power across these axes of change. For network politics: Will wikileaks and the anonymous millions tame governments, breaking through the veils of secrecy, forcing these institutions to reckon with a knowing public? Or will governments with sophisticated surveillance apparatus tame citizens, using big data to neutralize dissent before citizens even know they oppose the state? For network economics: will the netarchical giants like Google and Facebook capture all the potentials of the postindustrial sharing and making  economy, or will citizen driven peer-to-peer enterprises prevail?

While I am squarely on the side of an empowered public creating transparent institutions and the victory of community driven peer-to-peer enterprises, my own estimate of their chances is tempered by the magnitude of the challenges and by history. While the National Security Agency (NSA) and other bureaus and departments practice widespread surveillance of citizens (which has been known and documented for many many years), countries like China already use such surveillance technology (sometimes aided by US internet companies) to repress those in their own country who aim for nothing more than social justice.

This is my very small contribution to this ongoing challenge and process. If we are to find a way to overcome power with impunity, and reclaim our capacity to come together in dynamic and strategic solidarities, then we really do need some strategic understanding of the landscape of change that we inhabit. These 4 scenarios offered here: Caged Chickens, Peer-to-Peer Patriots, The Republic of Google, and finally…  The Federation of the Commons, each have their attendant strategic pathways and indicators.

But my real intention here is to start a debate about the futures of our society and the evolution of power in the network era. I by no means think that I have the futures figured out! Indeed I think exploring and understanding the futures is about fostering collective intelligence among peoples and citizens in every part of the world, so let the conversations begin!

I hope you enjoy the article and feel free to post comments on twitter @actionforesight

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The article “The Futures of Power in the Network Era” can be found HERE.

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Rising to the challenge of the 21st century: the role of futures research and practice

This short essay is adapted from a short piece I wrote during my time as Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, for their publication Global-is-Asian.

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More than ever, futures research is needed to support people’s critical understanding of the challenges we face in the 21st century, and support the development of actionable responses through public policy and social innovation. The field has evolved since the 1950’s through differerent stages, a linear / predicticive modality, systems thinking and the birth of alternative futures, critical futures studies, and participatory and action oriented approaches. The key issues in applying futures studies include the need for depth exploration, links with effective communications strategies, and the actionability of foresight through policy development and social innovation.

Introduction

The age of ad hoc and naïve long-term thinking is over. While humanity stumbled through the 20th century, through two catastrophic world wars and a cold war that led us to the brink of annihilation, and unbridled industrialization with profound ecological impacts, we will not have such wriggle room in the 21st century. The megacrises we face now require us to proactively identify and address a myriad of emerging issues using rigorous futures research, empowering and inspiring proactive anticipatory policy development at every level.

The need for rigor and credibility arises from the inherent slipperiness of the future as a domain of inquiry, too often exploited by quacks with either grandiose claims which pander to bias or predictions that leave people with a false sense of certainty. Credible futures research does not carry the pretenses of iron-clad certainty, but through analysis reveals the potential implications of social and ecological change, and what public policy responses (and flexibility) this demands from us in the present.

By anticipating emerging issues, we can proactively address emerging issues rather than become the proverbial “boiled frog”. Arguably, a litany of frogs are already in the pot, either simmering away or already at full boil: from issues such as climate change, sustainable food production, water management and equity, peak oil, and population growth, to digital surveillance / souveilance, nano-medicine, life extension, neuro-enhancement and designer-human technologies, robotics, alternative currencies, peer to peer production, augmented reality and intelligent cities, runaway financialization, globalization driven social strategification, urbanization and slums, threats to indigenous cultures, virtual education, potential technological singularities (e.g. artificial intelligence), militarization of space, super-power re-alignment and regionalization, shifting expectations for political expression and finally …. the urgent need to understand and care for the many aspects of our global commons.

Rather than boiled frogs, futures research can help us become “leaping frogs”. People need grounded yet inspiring visions of sustainable and empowering futures in every aspect of life, to motivate and empower change, and counter the paralysis and escapism caused by fatalism. Futures research can help us to leap creatively toward proactively addressing our challenges. If our guiding visions in the 20th century revolved around industrial and technological advancement, 21st century visions must also include and emphasize ecological, cultural, aesthetic and spiritual / moral development.

A futures research synopsis

Visionaries, prophets and Cassandras have been with us from the beginning. Systematic futures research, however, is only approximately 60 years old.

In the post WWII context, the emphasis on planned development in both Western, ex-colonial and Socialist states drove the development of new research tools, for example trend extrapolation and statistical modeling. Future oriented research began through the disciplines of planning, statistics, econometrics and the policy sciences. Generally speaking, futures research in this period assumed the future could be predicted based on existing trends and the application of institutional policy mechanisms.

The next stage in futures research, based on systems thinking, emerged in the early 1970’s. The limitations of forecasting-as-predication, and an appreciation of the complex interactions between multiple trends / variables in a system began to emerge. Trends could no longer be naively extrapolated into the future, what about their interactions? Drawing on pioneers in systems dynamics at MIT such as Jay Forrester, The Club of Rome’s produced their groud-breaking study, the Limits to Growth, which was followed by a host of other systems modeling efforts, which revealed alternative development paths. New distinctions emerged, for example the difference between probable, possible and normative (preferred) futures, wildcard (low probability but high impact) events, and a new acknowledgement of the human capacity to envision and create change. With scenario building as an important new tool “the future” became the plural “futures”.

The next stage in futures research, termed “critical futures studies” emerged in the mid 1980’s. Richard Slaughter in his 1984 PhD incorporated how perspectives condition and frame futures studies and research. Futures research is fundamentally skewed if it ignores how language and discourse frame an issue. Research on global futures by the RAND corporation differs from the Tellus Institute, not by a matter of degrees but by a matter of discourse. What is rational and valuable from one vantage point may be insane (or inane) from another. And, power permeates our visions, images and articulations of the future. The vision for large scale industrial modernization had led development efforts, but who or what have been left out  of this image of the future? Critical futures encourages us to ask: ‘Who is written out of the future?’ Women, children, community, the poor, indigenous people? And how can they be written back in? Ivana Milojevic, for examples, argues that because futures research is dominated by men (much like the field of planning has historically been), futures research outcomes and strategies have reflected men’s interests: technology, economic growth, innovation. A feminized futures research would be geared toward community, child care, education and relationships. As futures research may be gendered, it may also have cultural, ideological and discursive blind spots. How then do we reflect on and break out of the limitations of our perspectives? Sohail Inayatullah created the tool Causal Layered Analysis to explore how unexamined discourses, worldviews, ideologies, myths and metaphors underpin conceptions of we hold about the future, and to provide a way to discover alternative vantage points that lead to alternative futures. Zia Sardar argued, in the domain international development, our futures were already colonized, and Ashis Nandy asked, what do our utopias (our preferred futures) disown?

Finally and most recently, from the mid 1990’s, the field has developed participatory and action-oriented futures approaches, strengthening its capacity to engage a wide variety of stakeholders from across various parts of a social system to create common ground and common vision, and enable actionable outcomes for policy development. Many call this actionable and organizationally embedded style of futures research ‘strategic foresight’.

These four levels in the development of futures studies and research are not mutually exclusive, but rather integral to the continuing maturation of the field. A holistic approach incorporates each of them depending on the contextual requirements of the research and public policy development requirements.

Using futures research for empowerment

There are a variety of ways to employ futures research, however I’d like to highlight three key aspects: exploration, communication and action, all of which require well developed strategy.

Exploration in futures studies means expanding our awareness in relation to an issue. This requires environmental scanning to explore signs of change and innovation (via emerging issues analysis). As William Gibson is said to have said (although I have no proof of this!), “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Exploration implies understanding change, deepening our awareness of how our perspectives shape our research, and developing alternative futures via scenarios.

Communication in futures studies is critical. In a classic sense this means knowing how to frame futures research for a particular audience to have maximum impact, for example drawing on George Lakoff’s cognitive linguistics. In an educational setting it can mean giving students the tools of critical media literacy, to enable our youth to critically examine popular images or narratives of the future which may be fatalistic and energy-sapping; or like futurist David Wright, to teach students to create media about the future, using the tools of the social media revolution. It also means developing communications platforms that allow groups to harness their collective intelligence in thinking about futures, an example being the Institute for the Future’s “Foresight Engine”, a massively multiplayer online scenario gaming system.

Action in futures studies means linking an organization’s or community’s vision with its strategies and day to day work. Re-freshed visions for inspiring futures need to be linked with viable strategies, social innovation and action. Futures research needs to be concretely linked with policy development and social innovation, such that deepened strategic understanding and envigorated vision become resources for how we live in the present. Finally, action also means embodying our preferred futures by following Gandhi dictum to “be the change we want to see.”

Today more than ever we need empowering approaches to our global and local futures. Futures research offers some approaches that, in tandem with other disciplines and perspectives, help us address our world’s challenges. Futures research forms an important ingredient in the recipe for empowering people in the present to create inspiring futures in many aspects of life. It is not a promise or guarantee, but with a bit of love and care, from little seeds come the alternative futures we seek.

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Zhan Li: science fiction, design futures and foresight communication

I went to LA in June 2012, a lively trip where I did research on foresight communication, the sharing economy and gamification. I was told, in this context, by friend and colleague Stuart Candy that I had to talk to Zhan Li. So I caught up with him at his home in leafy South Pasadena.

He is a truly synthetic and integrative thinker, complex and sophisticated, and this is what I loved about talking with him. He pushed and challenged the boundaries of my understanding and comprehension.

He is writing a PhD dissertation through the Annenberg School of Communication and  Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he is exploring the cross roads of futures studies and communications, in particular trans-media story telling and narrative in foresight. I consider this one of THE most important lines of R&D in the futures field, so I’m greatly looking forward to reading his work as it emerges.

The interview spans across science fiction, design futures, foresight communication, narrative frameworks, organizational narratives and many other areas! It was one of those “wow cool” interviews where those new synaptic connections are made and my brain felt a little different after.

I hope you enjoy it. The nuance, sophisticated and complex mode of his discourse may be challenging for some, but it is worth every bit of the effort.

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The Inner Game of Futures

This past weekend I did a 3 day Vipassana meditation course in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin as taught by S.N. Goenka.

Vipassana, according to Goenka,  is a “nonsectarian” form of Buddhist meditation (I know that sounds somewhat contradictory), with strong similarities to the Theravada tradition in Buddhist practice. The majority of the practice entails observation of one’s breath,  observation of one’s body sensations,  and as an extension of this observation of all the psychosomatic “material”  that emerges from the process. The discipline lies in developing equanimity with all that arises, which leads to insight.

It was my 4th course,  and my experience has been consistently positive,  this last course no different.  It has helped me develop greater equanimity and inner peace, in particular in the face of life challenges.  In this most recent course what stood out for me was the consistent way in which this meditation approach helps me tap into my unconscious complexes and dynamics, providing insights that allow us me to create new paths of personal and interpersonal health and wellness.
At least five people throughout my life have been instrumental in guiding me towards meditation practices.

The first was my dad, Claudio, who used to take me to La Gran Fraternidad Universal, a Mexican yoga group and movement. They had a center in East LA, which he used to take me to at the tender young age of 13 or 14.  I still remember  the freezing cold showers I was subjected to after our asanas, which from memory preceded meditation and / or corpse pose. I also remember the veggie burgers, they were still firmly in the developmental stage in the mid-80s, I’m glad R&D departments around the world continued refining them. Later my dad also introduced me to the work of Parmahansa Yogananda.

Another big influence has been my friend and colleague and PhD supervisor Sohail Inayatullah, who has consistently encouraged me to meditate, mostly through his own excellent example.

Oliver Markley, futurists and researcher of noetic  technologies, who I studied with in 2000 in Houston, had a very large influence through his teaching of  futures oriented visualization, guided meditation, and psychodynamic therapeutic processes.  His suite of different approaches and techniques have had a fairly big impact on my life over time.

I also have to give some credit to my wife, De Chantal, who in 2003  began to attend the Friends  of the Western  Buddhist Order (FWBO), began to meditate,  and to provide some  in-house domestic “modeling”!

However, my late friend and colleague Ken Fernandes introduced me to Vipassana, and the gift he gave me I can never reciprocate, except to be more public  about the benefits of meditation, hence this post. Vipassana  was the “ proof in the pudding”  for me.  For many years I practiced this or that  type of meditation, without a strong sense of discipline or consistency. It was only have in a 10 day Vipassana course or witness the profound power of the technique in fostering personal and interpersonal health. I don’t think there’s any one path to meditation or inner work, it is really what works for each individual. I love the  modern era’s promise of eclecticism  across many traditions.

All of which has gotten me thinking about the inner game of futures. I’ve been introduced to lots of thinking and literature that’s helped to provide a window into the “inner”. At the former Australian Foresight Institute I was introduced to Spiral Dynamics, and the work of Ken Wilber. From Sohail I picked up Causal Layered Analysis and Voice Dialogue (Hal and Sidra Stone). All these perspectives  and approaches are great resources, and they’ve by now been extensively woven into futures research and facilitation by various practitioners. In fact the last chapter of my dissertation employed a hybrid scenario building process drawing on the multiple-selves / owned-disowned selves approach of Nandy-Stone-Inayatullah, to develop four futures for the alternative globalization movement / process.

But what is most real to me at the moment is not abstract frameworks, ideas, theories or models, but rather how the use of a meditation technique can create such a qualitatively different outlook on the future itself.  As much as these abstract frameworks are useful, I think we also need to include the practice of meditation and visualization as core elements in the inner game futures. Oliver Markley’s recent publication “Imaginal Visioning for Prophetic Foresight”   is an important knowledge base and legacy.  My hope is that our understanding and use of such techniques and technologies be further developed and fused with futures studies to better enable futures of health and well-being.

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Foresight, Innovation and Enterprise Modeling – A 10+ Year Journey

This draft paper, titled “Foresight, Innovation and Enterprise Modeling” (downloadable HERE), is the culmination of a decade long journey in attempting to link our evolving knowledge of emerging futures with present action, through a variety of means, innovation and enterprise development, design, activism, policy development, meditation (yes that is correct – doing absolutely nothing is a form of action;) and the like.

When I first got into futures in 2000, I was inspired by the eclecticism and range of thinking, profound, far reaching, visionary – and very much in Zia Sardar’s words I was both inspired and disturbed. And yet something was missing. I wanted a connection with our human capabilities and commitments in the present moment – what could we do today? What seeds could we plant? How do we trim the tabs, so to speak? Hence the very idea for “Action Foresight”, linking knowledge of emerging futures with empowered, intelligent and wise actions.

So I began in earnest to conceptually and practically link futures with present action. First I explored and developed ways of linking futures research with action, which emerged via the confluence of futures studies and action research / learning. I became a more committed activist and did work with the World Social Forum process and produced documentary media – my interest in Foresight Communication grew.

Another important stream was the importance of innovation, hence the idea for “Anticipatory Innovation“, and along side this futures informed enterprise development. This particular stream of my work is very dear to me, and has continued to evolve. I was fortunate to meet Adam Leggett at a birthday party for Peter Ellyard (thank you Peter) way back in 2001, and I began working on a pilot program Adam was initiating at Melbourne University called Univator. Later, from 2003-2005 I did some great research with Allan O’Connor on linking foresight and innovation, which culminated in a paper on empowering entrepreneurship and another on innovation for sustainability, and we ran a 5 day workshop for Questacon Smartmoves. All the while the thinking and practice continued to develop. In 2008 Peter Hayward invited me to write up an undergraduate unit for the school of business at Swinburne University of Technology on social enterprise, where I built in the methodology and further refined it. Most recently, 2012, I used this basic framework for the foresight methods course I taught at National University of Singapore, LKY School of Public Policy, where I developed an anticipatory policy development framework.

So it has been a long, winding and fruitful journey, and it’s not over! The paper is a “draft for comment”, and I’d like to keep the conversation open to facilitate a kind of ‘open source’ development of the methodology so anyone who adopts it can be more empowered in innovation and enterprise development that addresses the deep challenges of the 21st century.

Comments welcome here or via twitter @actionforesight

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Deep democracy, peer-to-peer production and our common futures / Syvädemokratia, vertaistuotanto ja yhteiset tulevaisuutemmemore

Earlier this year Dr. Vuokko Jarva, a futures scholar who works on consumer education to promote future consciousness and planetary responsibility and is developing new narrative approaches in futures studies, invited me to write an essay for the Finnish journal Futura (a publication of the Finnish Society for Futures Studies). The special edition of the journal was concerned with what in Finland is termed “close democracy”. From what I understand from Vuokko, this is not quite what is termed in English “participatory democracy”, it is more hands on, more involved, more peer to peer. I get the feeling that the Fins are way ahead of everyone else in pioneering democratic avenues of expression.

For my contribution, I decided to explore the connection between participatory democracy, peer production, the global movement for change and the commons. As it was exploratory and building the relationships between elements, it was more about understanding the connections in the emerging landscape of counter-hegemonic change. The essay is titled “Deep democracy, peer-to-peer production and our common futures / Syvädemokratia, vertaistuotanto ja yhteiset tulevaisuutemmemore“. Here is a general introduction to the themes:

In this essay I discuss an emerging perspective in the counter-hegemonic project to create social and ecological justice from the local to the global. This perspective is based on the idea that social innovators, connected within collaborative networks of social change, are the pre-figurative elements for a new type of social system to cohere and emerge. These collaborative networks are seed-beds of change and transformation, and are the foundations for emerging global movement(s) and projects for change. They are networks of people creating social alternatives, some already embodied in practices and enacted and others imagined and articulated. They have been most visible through the hundreds of social forums and the recent citizen uprisings held around the world, described by Paul Hawken as the greatest movement ever seen (Hawken, 2007). They are made up of a complex myriad of groups, networks, organizations, communities and movements, with diverse political and social views, that come together in the common struggle against political-economic corruption, and for social and ecological sustainment (Ramos, 2010). Paul Raskin (2006) considers these collaborative networks to be the foundation for building a pluralistic global citizen movement for the 21st century.

And here is an intro:

At first it was just a trickle, and then a torrent. At first a few experimented with carving our social life outside the dominant industrial system. But as the system began to capsize on the rocks of ecological and social ruin, it became an exodus. Necessity was the mother of invention, and people began to find their power by co-creating new ways of being and living, relating and transacting. People became new producers in an ecosystem of collaboration: cultural, political and economic. People began to join this new movement and create and demand the innovation of a multitude of deeply democratic social processes and institutions for the protection and production of the commons. Another World is Possible was no longer a slogan, but increasingly created in our life worlds, from the personal to the political.

I would appreciate any feedback / thoughts here or via twitter @actionforesight – many thanks!

Download the article HERE

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Emerging Futures Emerging Futurists Symposium 2012

In late November (Nov 30 2012) I had the incredible pleasure of spending good time with the folks at the Manoa School of Futures Studies, who brought an eclectic and dynamic group of emerging practitioners together from around the world.  I feel very grateful to the Manoa gang for their invitation to speak, and I learned a lot from everyone there. Many people made this happen but my understanding is that Aubrey Yee and John Sweeney drove the process.

The EFEFsymposium2012 brought together about 20 people experimenting on the edges of futures (Warning: not all the people on the attached schedule actually spoke, I believe this was a preliminary schedule). We got to learn from each other in a semi-formal/informal environment and I got this bad ass T-shirt! (Which I believe according to John Sweeney is Jim Dator’s fists with the tattoo “manoa school” written across:)

I was asked to speak about new directions for futures and futurists. I decided to run an exercise in Maoist self criticism, dredging up as many personal acts of “reflection”, along with some general ones, (and the random ‘dob in your neighbor’:) to use as fuel for the fire. I identified “five stupidities” as well as some emerging issues. The talk was by no means a definitive, exhaustive, universal or everlasting statement on futures studies. But it was really fun to think about and explore the issues and play the role of the provocateur. Here is my 40 min talk. Comments welcome…

 

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What Lies Beyond Economic Globalization… Cosmo-Localization?

In late october I gave a public talk at the school I just finished teaching with, the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore. I wanted to bend some of my dissertation work toward a policy, or at least strategy, orientation. Often times, the policy implications for futures oriented knowledge, scenarios, emerging issues, and global responses, is not so apparent. Thus I’m in the process of ‘translating’ some of the more technical / academic aspects of the work for a policy audience. The talk discussed the following:

While economic globalization has been the most notable global process over the past few decades, this has been accompanied by dramatic trans-border ecological issues, wealth / income stratification, security issues over criminal and terrorist networks, and a litany of other global challenges. Far from reaching the ‘End of History’, recent issues such as the global financial crisis and the effects of climate change portend a quickening of the debate over what globalization should be and where ‘it’ should go.

The talk  discuss the policy implications of  emerging visions for globalization. I made the point that visions for alternative globalizations can provide policy makers an opportunity to widen the field of options and strategies. Plural and parallel process of globalization can allow a ‘harmonization’ process across new definitions and aspects of global change as an essential accompaniment (or counter-point) to the now dominant economic definition. Yet plural visions need to be accompanied by coherences, and a central argument was thus the need to create spaces and platforms whereby diverse state and non-state actors holding diverse perspectives can cooperate and collaborate to address the world’s great 21st century challenges.

During the talk, I  actually ran out of time to cover all 9 discourses for alternative globalizations in my dissertation. In fact I had only covered about 4 (post-colonial, relocalization, peer to peer and cosmopolitan). So I needed to improvise a bit to tie up the end. Over the past year I’ve been experimenting with a concept I like to call “Cosmo-localization”. I’ve also had some great discussions with Michel Bauwen’s and there are parallels to his vision for a transnational peer to peer economy. So to round off the talk I decided to ‘wing it’ it with Cosmo-localization. I think there is something in this, but of course it will take a bit of time to get the articulation right, after an article or two, but at least this is a start. Comments very much welcome.

 

 

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Asia Deep Dive on the Commons and the Temporalities of the Commons

I was invited in mid Oct to participate in the Asia Deep Dive on the Commons, a process  of the Heinrich Bo?ll Foundation‘s Commons Strategy Group, in large part due to Michel Bauwens’ influence and via our dialogues on alternative globalizations.

The HB foundation is doing amazing pioneering work bringing together social innovators and thinkers from around the world to develop an emerging discourse on the commons. Following their landmark conference in 2009 in Berlin bringing together people from every angle and niche of the commons, David Bollier and Silke Heilfrich have produced a landmark text, The Wealth of the Commons.

In lead up to their follow up major conference in 2013 to focus on the economics of the commons, they ran various working groups around the world, one in Mexico, another in Bangkok, and another I don’t know where.

It was great to meet and dialog in such depth with others working toward a commons-nurturing world. It was incredibly intense, intellectually overwhelming at times, and a powerful experience. I came away with an expanded and more complex understanding of the many dimensions of the commons, its challenges, struggle and strategic pathways. I also came away with new friends and comrades. Here is a picture of us:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had wanted to write about the strategic dimensions in the democratic development of the commons for years. My thesis work made it clear that this was the golden thread that brought together many movements, visions and projects. In the wake of the deep dive I have put time and energy into finally putting forward the key ideas surrounding the temporalities of the commons.

This draft paper, titled Temporalities of the Commons: Toward Narrative Coherence and Strategic Vision, details a number of counter hegemonic narratives and temporalities, interrogating each for what they have to offer an emerging narrative and temporality for the commons. Using these discourses, an outline for historical antecedents, present processes, and future agendas are constructed toward a narrative of commoning. The article also proposes some strategic considerations regarding the timescales within which different commoning projects might be understood. Overall the article is an attempt to offer one starting point with which to dialogue and debate the narrative and strategic development of post­?capitalist commons-­nurturing political economies and societies.

It is a heuristic that provides a point by which to evolve our narrative and strategic understandings of the commons project, to provoke discussion and debate. It does not assume conceptual and strategic finality, but rather to facilitate the evolution of our narrative and strategic thinking with respect to creating a commons nurturing world.

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Foresight in a Network Era: Peer-producing Alternative Futures

I’d like to announce the publication of a refereed article in the Journal of Futures Studies: “Foresight in a Network Era: Peer-producing Alternative Futures”

Over the two and some years I’ve worked with colleagues Tim Mansfield and Gareth Priday, in the Services2020 team. Over the last year we have studied network based approaches to foresight work.

It was a rather winding journey, looking for new ways to think about how foresight can be done in a network era. Many workshops and drafts later we have finally come to this result, no doubt to be superseded by others in the not too distant future in the ever evolving conceptualization of our cybernetic civilization. But nevertheless we are happy with where we have arrived for now.

The article addresses the evolution of foresight in a network era. In it we look at a number of examples of ‘network foresight’, using new analytic approaches to understand their dynamics: Replication, Openness, Prefiguration, and exploring the relevance for the development of Anticipatory Democracy.

In the abstract we write:

The advent of the network form has ushered in new practices and possibilities for participation and collaboration based on emerging on-line technologies. It is no surprise that new approaches to futures / foresight research and engagement are being developed in the context of these technologies and emerging practices. In dwelling within this juxtaposition between participatory futures and the maturing network era, we ask what the implications are for foresight / futures studies, and how this can help us re-imagine Anticipatory Democracy in the 21st century. A developmental narrative for the emergence of the network form in futures studies provides context for our understanding of new pathways. Within this we identify key emerging issues with implications for Anticipatory Democracy: instantiation, replication, openness and control. Explicated, these emerging issues provide a rich picture of the challenges and possibilities for building Anticipatory Democracy in the network era.

We believe network foresight holds great promise for promoting Anticipatory Democratic aims, and hope that we see great innovations in the years to come that brings citizens together to explore, imagine and create alternative futures and a global foresight commons that can help us all address and thrive in the face of our wicked challenges.