Services 2020

Futurepedia will be a public wiki in many languages that covers a topic Wikipedia traditionally hasn't (until recently, see below) allowed: thinking and writing about the future. This would be a major advance to global foresight culture, something all the world's citizens should have. We've reserved Futurepedia.org for this, and are just waiting for volunteers to help us find sponsors. Perhaps you? At Futurepedia you will find structured speculations on possible, probable, and preferable (3P's) futures in science, technology, environmental, economic, political, and social (STEEPS) domains. As in Wikipedia we will use MediaWiki software, and all material will be shared in a Creative Commons share-alike or GNU Free Documentation License.

Despite an uncertain global economy and a continually shifting regulatory environment, the top teams at the world's leading banks are starting to plot paths toward growth. With no proven economic model to point to, bankers are attempting to understand the many possible futures they could confront over the next decade. In the industry's first-ever interactive eBook published by Ernst & Young and Knowledge@Wharton, "Global Banking 2020: Foresight & Insights," banking leaders explore a spectrum of potential scenarios - including some extreme possibilities - that could develop in the coming decade, along with strategies to help global banks thrive.

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:

Yesica and her lawyers have exercised a legal right now dubbed the "Right to Be Forgotten" that allows you to remove embarrassing pictures or information you put on the Web - and do it permanently, totally. Which means you can tell Yahoo or Google or Facebook, "I don't want that there anymore. I want this to be forgotten. You have the image or the email or whatever in your computers. Remove it. And if you don't, you are breaking the law."

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.

FutureScapes, a new collaboration of thinkers, designers, futurologists and writers, is encouraging us to imagine the future - to consider how technology and entertainment can shape a better, more sustainable world

 Biomass role in achieving the Climate Change & Renewables EU policytargets. Demand and Supply dynamics under the perspective of stakeholders . IEE 08 653 SI2. 529 241

We Solve For X is a new project that Google has put together to help solve some of the world's greatest problems that are facing our civilization. Problems such as global warming, and other stuff of science fiction that just might be possible

A thousand miles off California, the North Pacific Ocean Gyre contains one of the largest ecosystems on Earth--but it may be in danger from a deluge of accumulated plastic trash. Dubbed the "Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch," the debris at the center of the North Pacific Ocean has the potential to damage marine life and alter the biological environment. Though this issue has recently received popular media attention, there was little scientific information available on the composition, extent, and effects of the debris. The small pieces of plastic that make up most of the material are not detectable by satellites or airplanes. Researchers requiring detailed scientific sampling must use ships capable of traveling to this remote region.

Project Kaisei is a non-profit organization focused on increasing awareness of the scale of marine debris, its impact on our environment, and the solutions for both prevention and clean-up.

From August 2-21, a group of doctoral students and research volunteers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego embarked on an expedition aboard the Scripps research vessel New Horizon to explore the problem of plastic in the North Pacific Gyre.

International Futures (IFs) is a large-scale, long-term, integrated global modeling system. It represents demographic, economic, energy, agricultural, socio-political, and environmental subsystems for 183 countries interacting in the global system. The central purpose of IFs is to facilitate exploration of global futures through alternative scenarios. The model is integrated with a large database containing values for its many foundational data series since 1960. Through this web site IFs is freely available to users both on-line and in downloadable form.

The Global Mail is a philanthropically funded, not-for-profit news and features website. Our mission is to deliver original, fearless, independent journalism. We will strive to inform, provoke, expose - and entertain. Our audience is our only agenda. We have no advertisers to answer to, nor shareholders who seek to profit. And our generous philanthropic benefactor has no interest in what journalism we produce. What The Global Mail produces will be the evidence of that.

Society 5 plans to explore the past, present and potential futures of our society, initially as a blog at society5.net, and then as a book and beyond.

Human Contact - a hard SF roleplaying game about humans

Foresight is not about making predictions. Rather, it's a tool for identifying dynamics of change, in part by exploring the implications of those changes. This is a point I've made often enough that even I'm sick of it-but it remains an idea that not enough people understand. It's next to useless to say "X will happen;" it's much more valuable to say "here's why X could happen."

Interest brings groups together, but intent is what brings teams together to actually get things done.  Intentcasting is deceptively simple to describe. It consists in broadcasting your intent to make something happen.