Crowd sourced scenario planning

Noah Raford writes with details of his research project, Hopes and Dreams: The Future of Public Service. You write a narrative, and it gets data-mined for trends and themes, which then get re-packaged as scenarios:

We want your micro-narratives, your thoughts and feelings about the future, your ideas and concerns of what might become.  Please tell us a story about the trends and signals which you think are important, your personal experiences, or what you think will be vital to public service in the future.  It doesn’t have to be long, just a few lines, or it can be much longer if like.

After collecting your stories, we will be analysing emerging trends and themes as part of a semi-automated scenario creation process.  In the future all of this will be online and community driven.  At the moment this part is all done off-line, so you’ll have to wait a few weeks for the results.

Although this particular exercise relates to mass data capture using distributed, participatory sources, the exciting part of this research relates to the emergent scenario creation which will result.

The goal of the next step therefore is to explore new ways of working with this information to take advantage of the collective intelligence of the web, as opposed to simply recreating traditional face-to-face scenario processes online.  Imagine something like Bruce Sterling’s Correlation Engine, using a million minds as the processor to generate surprising and useful alternative futures around a key topic.

I find completely unstructured survey responses quite hard, but I’m working away on my response to “How will governments and cities adapt to managing public resources under increasing constraints?”.

Another Noah project - Futurescaper - sounds super interesting and worthy of a longer write-up.