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"Together, they highlight five "technologies that matter" for cities in 2020: mobile broadband; smart personal devices, whether they're dirt-cheap phones or tablets; government-sponsored cloud computing (modeled on the U.K.'s national "G-cloud" initiative); open-source public databases to promote grassroots innovation, and "public interfaces." Instead of Internet cafés, imagine an outdoor LED screen and hacked Kinect box allowing literally anyone to access the Net using only gestures."

"SACRAMENTO, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 09/01/11 -- e.Republic's Center for Digital Government has announced the 2011 winners of its annual Best of the Web and Digital Government Achievement Awards. "

Malcolm Turbull on Wikileaks, "There will be a medium term impact on the candour with which people talk to American officials. Frankly if I were an American citizen I would be less outraged with Assange than I would be with a Government that can allow such a gigantic breach of security. The United States will need to demonstrate that it has changed its ways, and it is not that hard. Most large organisations will not permit downloading of material to an external medium without express authorisation as those of you who work for large firms should already know. And it goes without saying that if a young Private can copy so much classified material off his own volition, how vulnerable are US systems to more sophisticated operatives who have the backing and expertise provided by foreign intelligence agencies. We will remain forever, I imagine, rightly angry at the recklessness of receiving and publishing so much confidential material. So far it seems less harm has been done than might have been the case, but the risks are extraordinary and if only one life was lost, if only one sensitive operation was compromised then the heavy responsibility for that must lie with Assange. I would like to hope that in the future such revelations will be more discriminating, but it is hard to be confident. The lesson for Governments, apart from improving their security, is to assume that everything said or written will, sooner or later, see the light of day. That may not be a good thing, and it certainly doesn't make life easier, but it is, I fear, a reality. The Governments with most to fear from such disclosure are those whose public statements are at odds with their private opinions - and as I noted earlier so far it appears, to its credit, that the US State Department's private cables have been consistent with their public policy."

Something immense is happening as the world transitions to a hyperconnected state where, for many, the distinction between the real and virtual worlds has ceased to exist. All the trailing paraphernalia of states and borders and government-to-government palavers, not to mention privacy laws, look so 20th century.

Absent significant changes on the spending and/or revenue sides of the federal budget, long term deficits will encumber a growing share of federal resources and test the capacity of current and future generations to afford both today's and tomorrow's commitments. Continuing on this unsustainable path will gradually erode, if not suddenly damage, our economy, our standard of living and ultimately our national security. Incremental approaches to budgeting will need to give way to more fundamental and periodic reexaminations of the base of government, ultimately covering discretionary and mandatory programs as well as the revenue side of the budget. Having identified the major fiscal challenge facing the nation, and given our role in supporting the Congress, we believe that GAO also has an obligation to provide policymakers with support in identifying issues and options that could help to address these fiscal pressures. In this report, we draw on our past and pending work-about 90 percent of which is either requested by the Congress or required by law-- to provide policy makers with examples of the kinds of hard choices stemming from these challenges in the form of questions for elected officials and other policy makers to consider.

Thought leaders in the field - including Bruce Sterling, Jamais Cascio, Bill McKibben, Witold Rybczynski and Jay Oglivy - will kick-start the launch by blogging about what "prevailing" means to them. Readers will be encouraged to become authors and help direct the discussion in groups devoted to everything from "Creating Stronger, Faster Communities" and "Human Enhancement" to "Revolutionizing Learning" and "Foresight - How Can We Think Critically About the Future?" "Prevailproject.org will be a place for everybody from my mother to technologists inventing the future to grapple with some of the most pressing questions of our time: How are the genetics, robotics, information and nano revolutions changing human nature, and how can we shape our own futures, toward our own ends, rather than being the pawns of these explosively powerful technologies?" said Joel Garreau, the Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, and director of The Prevail Project: Wise Governance for Challenging Futures.

What were current consumer confidence readings? It would take weeks or months to find out, and even then only selected countries would be reported on.I kept asking myself, what is the point of having a forward indicator when it takes so long to get the data?Remember that consumer confidence is not drawn from government data that needs to be tallied in highly secure data rooms.It is just an aggregation of our views Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/crowdsourcing-the-future-introducing-global-real-time-consumer-confidence-tracking-2011-5?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+businessinsider+%28Business+Insider%29#ixzz1NtezvKXE

Mosman council in Sydney offers open datasets to the public.

What's Next is a trends report offering clear, concise and non-sensationalist commentary on trends in society, business, science & technology, government and the environment. Each issue covers trends across twelve sectors and speculates about future risks and opportunities.

An industry that once told hard truths to corporate and government clients now mostly just tells them what they want to hear, making it harder for us all to adapt to a changing world -- and that's why I'm leaving it.

Forum for the Future is a non-profit organisation working globally with business and government to create a sustainable future. We have 15 years' experience inspiring new thinking, building creative partnerships and developing practical innovations to change our world. We aim to transform the critical systems that we all depend on, such as food, energy and finance, to make them fit for the challenges of the 21st century.

"Australia's Federal Government announced the National Broadband Network (NBN) in 2009. NBN's current roll-out is scheduled for completion in 2021, with market forecasts estimating optical fibre overtaking DSL broadband connections in about 2015. This paper provides a timely contribution to more critical and expansive analysis of potential Australian internet futures. First, 'schools of thought' and current technological frames (Web 2.0, 'the cloud') for the internet and its possible futures are outlined, which provide perspectives on the emergence of the NBN. We then outline five generic images of the future which, as predetermined images, enable quick 'incasting' of alternative futures for a technology topic or related object of research: promised future, social/speculative bubble(s), unfolding disruption/chaos, unintended consequences, and co-existence/'cooption'. High-level application of the 'schools' and generic images to the NBN and Australia's potential internet futures, suggests policymakers and strategists currently consider too few perspectives."

We continually scan tens of thousands of high-quality, online news publications, blogs, public niche sources, trade publications, government web sites, financial databases and more.

" Pascal Lamy, Director-General of the World Trade Organization, will lead a meeting in Oxford today of international business, government and other leaders to address the gridlock in international and national attempts to deal with key global problems. The meeting launches the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations. The Commission seeks to address the growing short-term preoccupations of modern politics and identify ways to overcome today's impasse in key economic, climate, trade, security and other negotiations."

ONE of humanity's ultimate dreams, to peer into the future, may be moving a step closer with a controversial €1 billion ($1.3bn) EU plan to recreate the entire world in a computer system. The Living Earth Simulator project would take the vast streams of data pouring into the internet, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to dry-as-dust government statistics, and try to spot the economic and social trends that will shape the future.

LONDON-Today, Monday 27 February, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files - more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods, for example:

Do you want to write the book...

"People sense the world is passing through a Technology Revolution but they lack good information. We pool the knowledge of 100 experts to forecast breakthroughs for corporations, governments and others in real time. TechCast was cited by the National Academies, featured in Newsweek and the Washington Post, and recognized as possibly the best forecasting system in the world. "