Current events
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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.
You are invited to state your willingness to participate in these events and cooperate for their organizing. If you have an idea for an event that you believe it should be organized, create a FORwiki page, list it under On the community's agenda, and try to create an alliance with other members around it. Once the concept, objectives, participation, location, and time frame are set, transfer it in the box In preparation, and create the event's own box in this portal.
Jointly Shaping and Launching the Foresight Wiki is a planned workshop, during which the Foresight Wiki will be officially launched. Prior to the event, each participant will put one Foresight case online within the Narratives portal. Each participant is welcomed to tell his/hers Foresight story in any way s/he think best to bring out the most interesting aspects. It is recommended to keep in mind that some readers may be interested in the outcomes of an exercise while others may rather want to know “how it was done”. In particular those practitioners who will use the experience to do something similar will most likely be interested in “what went wrong” and “lessons learned” at least as much as in success stories. (more...)
Integrating Futures Methodologies is a workshop to be organized in Bucharest, coordinated by Prof. Ziauddin Sardar and Prof. George Cairns. Future studies and foresight have a rich store of methodologies – ranging from forecasting, scenario planning and trend analysis to Delphi, modelling, simulation, cross-impact analysis, early warning signals, weak signals, road maps, visioning, backcasting, casual layered analysis and integral futures, to mention just a few. ‘The State of the Future 2009’ report, from the Millennium Project, lists over 30 methods now being used in futures and foresight work. However, given the characteristics of contemporary times – where everything is seen to be connected to everything else, complexity and uncertainty is the norm, and there is an increasing tendency towards chaotic behaviour – no single method can provide us with an adequate way of perceiving alternative futures. We need approaches that encompass different and divergent perspectives, concerns of diverse groups and cultures, and contradictory desires, hopes and aspirations for the future. Moreover, futures work on complex and ambiguous – or intractable – problems requires an inter- and trans-disciplinary approach. (more...)
Crazy Foresight is a workshop to be organized in Bucharest,in Jamuary 2011. The coordinators are Prof. George Cairns and Prof. Ziauddin Sardar.
‘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' (more...)