Global Swarm

The Action Foresight “Global Swarm” is an assembly of friends and colleagues who come together to collaborate, scale and mutualize resources for big challenges, high impact foresight projects and our shared commons. We are a geographically, culturally, and professionally distributed team of researchers, innovators, and practitioners whose plurality of perspectives facilitate our collective creativity, enabling us to better formulate methodologies, capture discoveries, and perform analysis that best addresses the complexity of our contemporary challenges. Our collective creativity is facilitated by our plurality of perspectives and our shared vision of enabling plural futures. Our track record represents our value and ability to surface and empower subaltern and outlier perspectives and engender preferred futures.

Team

dr. john a. sweeney

John A. Sweeney is an award-winning futurist, designer, and author. He consults widely and has delivered keynote presentations, seminars, and training courses in over 45 countries on five continents. John has led, organized, and facilitated strategic planning and foresight projects for a range of clients, including numerous humanitarian and development agencies, government innovation units, and Fortune 500 companies. At present, John serves as an Assistant Professor of Futures and Foresight at Narxoz University where he is also the Director at the Qazaq Research Institute for Futures Studies. He also currently serves as co-Editor of World Futures Review with Dr. Nur Anisah Abdullah. John tweets on trends, emerging issues, and all things postnormal at @aloha_futures. CV

  • Extensive experience (over 25 countries in the past three years) utilizing participatory / experiential methods with a particular focus on gaming
  • 10 years as a futures researcher and foresight practitioner
  • Specialization in applying futures and foresight within developing contexts (Asia-Pacific, Central Asia, & Eastern Europe)

dr. anisah abdullah

Dr Anisah graduated with a PhD (Operations Research) from Strathclyde University and is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists. She helps organisations plan strategically, and to design and develop performance measurement systems for organisational improvement. She uses foresight and scenario planning to help organisations go beyond just forecasting to the generation of preferred futures. Her portfolio of strategy development workshops includes UNDP Georgia and Innovative Service Lab Georgia, Employee Provident Fund Malaysia, Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia, National Higher Education Research Institute Malaysia and International Islamic University Malaysia. Her teaching and research work now extends to Foresight and higher education. CV

dr. aaron b. rosa

Dr. Aaron B. Rosa is a professional alternative futures researcher with over a decade of experience in the design and facilitation of strategic foresight workshops for private sector and public governance institutions. He has published numerous articles in the field, and has received awards both for research excellence and the design of workshop systems. He works across a number of media to better engage diverse stakeholder groups with practical futures experiences. CV

  • EU Foresight Projects with a particular focus on participatory methods (CIMULACT, BOHEMIA, PROGRESS)
  • Applied futures research with public and private institutions (i.e. UNDP, EU JRC, Prime Minister’s offices: Dubai, Singapore)
  • Focus on developing interactive systems for citizen engagement.

pupul bisht

Pupul is a multi-disciplinary foresight practitioner and the main award Winner of the Joseph Jaworski Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Award 2018. Her practice is rooted in humancentred insights and lies at the intersection of futures thinking, systems design, and participatory research. In 2018 she founded the Decolonizing Futures Initiative, a global project that aims to engage marginalized communities in imagining their preferred futures in order to inform and inspire inclusive policy-making and innovation. Through this initiative, Pupul is pioneering the use of her novel foresight method inspired by the Kaavad folk-storytelling tradition of Rajasthan, India— one of the first and only foresight methods directly derived from a non-western tradition. CV

daniel riveong

Daniel Riveong is an academically trained futurist and was a 2018 Emerging Fellow for the Association of Professional Futurists on Global South issues. Daniel’s foresight work includes use of gaming for participatory foresight, workshop facilitation, foresight tools development, futures-related research, and report development. In his previous career, Daniel was the Asian region GM for a digital consultancy in Kuala Lumpur. He co-led digital transformation workshops for Yves Saint Laurent to Fitness First. He has also co-presented papers with the Indonesian Statistics Agency. CV

  • Diverse foresight experience – from foresight toolkits for innovation teams to futures-focused reports on complex multi-domain systems
  • Led foresight and digital transformation workshops in Asia, Europe, US
  • Researched Global South economies with APF & Indonesian Government

 

abril chimal

Abril Chimal is a curious mind who found a perfect playground for exploration between creative design and academic knowledge within futures. She has a graphic design background and a specialization in Design of Tomorrow at CENTRO in Mexico City. At present, she is the Chief Pollinator for the Participatory Futures Global Swarm. In her position, she creates an intersectional space to foster Participatory Futures projects around the globe. Abril has been a speaker, facilitator, collaborator, and mentor with UNDP Panama, UNDP RBAS, and UNDP Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is also professor of Futures Thinking & Creativity at CENTRO in Mexico City and also serves as the Technical Editor for the Journal of Futures Studies. To catch a glimpse of the past, presents and future of Mexico City, check out her Instagram: @abrilchimal.

 

donna dupont

Donna Dupont is a Foresight and Design Strategist with a focus in disaster risk management and sustainable development. She has a focus on strengthening local capacity, public safety and security. She is a design instructor/facilitator at the Canadian Forces College, Department of National Defence with 20+ years’ experience working in health care and emergency management. She is formerly a Senior Policy/Planning Advisor and Provincial Emergency Manager working with complex systems, and addressing contentious and emerging issues in situations of evolving risk and uncertainty. She is a recipient of seven government awards at the provincial and federal level for outstanding achievement, excellence and partner relations in policy and strategic planning. She currently focuses on advancing futures and design methodologies in emergency/disaster management with a strong interest in emerging technologies and inclusive systems of engagement to harness collective intelligence to advance strategic planning priorities and implementation. CV

jacques barcia

Jacques Barcia is an award-winning journalist, published science fiction author and professional futurist. He’s covered technology, crime and human rights stories for Brazilian newspapers for 15 years. As an author, his stories were featured in books such as Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic SF and The Apex Book of World SF, and magazines such as Clarkesworld and Electric Velocipede. Jacques also works as a foresight consultant under the brand Futuring.Today, whose approach blends foresight, science fiction and design to prototype alternative visions of the futures. He also serves as futures advisor for Brazilian non-profit science and technology park Porto Digital. Jacques is a research fellow of the Institute For the Future (IFTF), and a fellow of the Centre For Postnormal Policy and Futures Studies (CPPFS). He holds a Masters in Design from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE), and is the Design Futures faculty at Cesar School. Jacques is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists (APF), and a member of the Plurality University Network (U+). CV

gareth priday 

gareth priday is a futures thinker and living labs advocate, drawing from a broad range of experience from project managing teams on mission critical projects for large investment banks, setting up a national living labs network and on the ground research in remote and local communities. CV

dr. jose ramos 

Jose Ramos is a social innovator, researcher, advocate for the commons and a mutant futurist. He has 20 years as a futures thinker / advocate, writer and organiser. He has a great passion for exploring who we are as planetary beings, which includes ethnographic study of alternative globalizations, writings on planetary stigmergy / collaboration, and research on cosmo-localization. This line of work connects him to the truth that we are all brothers and sisters on a planet that we mutually depend on for our survival and wellbeing – our shared commons. He is originally from California of Mexican ancestry. Born in Oakland, he grew up in a very multi-cultural suburb of Los Angeles. After living in Japan and Taiwan, where he studied Japanese and Mandarin, he moved to Melbourne Australia to be with his wife, De Chantal. They have two children, son Ethan and daughter Rafaela. CV

  • 20+ peer reviewed publications on participatory futures, network foresight, anticipatory governance and digital democracy
  • 15+ years experience at the intersection of participatory futures processes and digital democracy / governance (see phd)
  • 18+ years running and managing futures research projects

About me – Futurescraft

rok kranjc

Rok Kranjc is a political ecologist and policy researcher, translator and editor, radio journalist and grassroots climate movement organizer based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Drawing on and combining degrowth, posthumanism, decoloniality, the commons, transformative social innovation, transition design, speculative fiction, games and participatory futures processes, his work is geared towards empowering locally situated as well as more global and distributed collective practices of cultural, socio-economic and political transformation towards resilient, pluriversal and heterotopic futures. CV