Current events

The Current events portal presents worldwide events in the field of Future Studies & Foresight. In particular, all the Mutual Learning Workshops organised during the Quality and Leadership for Romanian Higher Education project, implementing the concept of Bucharest Dialogues, are presented in this section of the Foresight Wiki. Members of the FORwiki Community are invited to state their willingness to participate in these events and cooperate for their organizing. If you have an idea for an event that you feel it would be of interest for the Foresight Community of Practice, create a FORwiki page, list it under On the community's agenda, and try to create an alliance with other members of the FORwiki Community around it.


 * Workshop: Systems Thinking for Foresight, Bucharest (Romania), September 23rd - 25th, 2009
 * Workshop: Scenario Building in Higher Education, Bucharest (Romania), October 30th - November 1st, 2009
 * Jointly Shaping and Launching the Foresight Wiki, Bucharest (Romania), April 14th - 16th, 2010
 * Workshop: Integrating Futures Methodologies, Bucharest (Romania), June 9th - 11th, 2010
 * 21st Century Higher Education: Leadeship, Innovation and Human Capital Development - Euro-Atlantic, Black Sea and Caspian Sea Area Studies, Bucharest (Romania), July 8th - 10th, 2010
 * Workshop: Foresight in the University, Bucharest (Romania), September 29th - October 1st, 2010
 * Workshop: Expert Knowledge, Prediction, Forecasting: A Social Sciences Perspective, Bucharest (Romania), November 19th - 21st, 2010
 * Workshop: Collaborative Methods for Foresight: Delphi, Scenarios, and Models, Bucharest (Romania), April 13th - 15th, 2011
 * Workshop: Vision Building, Bucharest (Romania), May 3rd-4th, 2011
 * Workshop: Background Research for Scenario Building: Economic Clusters, Knowledge Economy and Development Strategies, Bucharest (Romania), May 27th - 29th, 2011
 * Workshop: Crazy Foresight, Delta Nature Resort (Romania), June 28th - July 1st, 2011
 * UNIDO Workshop: Strategic Intelligence for Extended Regional Coherence, Bucharest (Romania), August 30th - 31st, 2011
 * Workshop: Trans-national Foresight for a Black Sea Higher Education Area, Bucharest (Romania), August 31st - September 2nd, 2011

‘Any useful idea about the future', says Jim Dator – considered by many to be grandfather of the field – 'should appear to be ridiculous'. Why? Because much of the future is going to be totally novel and has not been currently or previously experienced. Thus, anything useful that one can say about the future would appear to most people as quite crazy. Dator goes on to state, in his Seventh Law of Futures, that 'if futurists expect to be useful, they should expect to be ridiculed and for their ideas initially to be rejected'. In a slightly different vein, Sardar's First Law of Futures Studies states that 'futures studies are wicked'. They are wicked because they deal with 'wicked problems' which are by nature complex, chaotic, interconnected with in-built contradictions and uncertainty. But futures studies are also 'wicked in the sense that they are playfully open ended (like a 'scientific' discipline they do not offer a single solution but only possibilities). Their boundaries, such as they are, are totally porous and they are quite happy to borrow ideas and tools, whatever is needed, from any and all disciplines and discourses'. So what some people may perceive as crazy may actually be highly useful. And wickedness – that highlights and plays with complexity and uncertainty with verve and wit – can actually open up new domains for the future, unlocking the 'unthought' of foresight and futures studies. Far from being irrelevant, crazy and playfully wicked ideas have a positive role in futures and foresight work and can be useful tools for investigating the outer boundaries of futures deliberations and perceptions. (more...)