I’m honored to have two chapters included in the recent new book, “The Future of Futures“, published by the Association of Professional Futurists. The book explores emerging issues in scenario planning and foresight. My first chapter, reproduced below, is about the effect of crowdsourcing, big data and the web on scenario planning and foresight. You [...]
Tag Archives: crowdsourcing
Complete PhD Online
October 10 11
I finished my PhD at MIT this August, on “Large Scale Participatory Futures Systems: a Comparative Study of Online Scenario Planning Approaches”. I’ll write more soon, but here is the full PDF (11.4 megabytes) and the slides from my defense, below. From the abstract: This dissertation explores the role that participatory online collective intelligence systems [...]
Guest blogging at Cognitive Edge, Updated
July 14 11
I finished guest blogging at Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge site recently. Go have a look and see what you think. So far I’ve blogged about: Foveal and Peripheral Vision Threats: What Kind of Threats Do We Face in the 21st Century? Learning to See the Unseen New Movement, New Mastery: Perceptual Dexterity in the 21st [...]
The Future of Public Services; Innovations in Online Scenario Planning, Part 2
April 24 11
The following mini-scenarios were created using the SenseMaker Suite Scenarios approach developed for my PhD with Dave Snowden and Wendy Schultz. They were auto-aggregated using narrative fragments contributed by over 265 participants from around the world. In other words, participants submitted stories of the future, tagged them, and then the system clustered them based [...]
Update from the Oxford Futures Forum, 2011
April 21 11
This week (April 18th) I attended the third Oxford Futures Forum at the Said Business School of Oxford University. Among other things, the Forum aimed to: Forge and support an international community of future-minded practices aimed at actionable knowledge. It was a remarkable gathering of futures practitioners, young and old, with a partial list of [...]
Eight Ideas for 21st-Century Risk Managers
February 14 11
UPDATE (April, 2011): The full article (“Gifts of Sight“) is now online at Risk Professional magazine. It is behind a pay wall, but email me and I’ll send you a personal copy. I was recently asked to explain some of the concepts I use in my research to a journalist interested in new developments in [...]
An Interview with GBN
December 29 10
I recently did a Q & A for the Fall 2010 issue of the GBN Bulletin (pdf here). Here is an extract from the PDF, in which I talk about crowdsourced scenarios, urban change, design & strategy. I’ve added links and re-inserted a few of references and shout-outs that didn’t make it into the final edit, [...]
Emergent Futures Mapping with Futurescaper
December 14 10
Futurescaper is an online tool for making sense of the drivers, trends and forces that will shape the future. As a user interface system, it still needs development. As a tool for analyzing and understanding complex systems, it works very well and does something I have yet to see anything else be able to do. [...]
Three Innovations in Crowd Sourced Scenario Planning, Part 1
October 30 10
I’ve spent the better part of the last four years working on approaches to online scenario planning as part of my PhD. During this time I have designed and implemented three systems – each of which explored a different approach to crowd sourcing, engagement and online participation in futures work. I call these experiments in “large-scale participatory futures systems”.
How to Build a Collective Intelligence Platform to Crowdsource Almost Anything
August 21 10
The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence recently published an important overview of the theory and mechanisms behind successful crowdsourcing efforts. Their report, called “Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence“, can be found here.