Announcing: Open Foresight & The Future of Facebook Project

Posted by on Tuesday, March 1, 2011 · 73 Comments 

In a world characterized by increasing complexity and accelerating change, we need tools that help us understand future possibilities in order to make more informed decisions today. The field of Futures Studies, or Strategic Foresight, has already developed many such tools, but they are still not commonly utilized by the general public.So, I’ve partnered up with a colleague, Alvis Brigis, to help elevate the ‘futures thinking’ meme. We’re developing a process called Open Foresight, which aims to serve as an updated model for harvesting collective insight, generating scenarios, and creating strategic roadmaps into the future.

By combining available data, opinions from the experts, and the conventional wisdom of the crowds, we’ll be able to analyze a topic from a wide range of perspectives and viewpoints. We’ll then distill that down into a series of animation-rich videos that summarize these insights. The methodologies used will help us all gain a better understanding of the risks, opportunities, and implications surrounding the issues important to us. All of the content we collect will be made available via Creative Commons SA by-cc so that it can be reused, remixed, and built upon by others.

The first project to employ this framework was launched on Kickstarter today – The Future of Facebook video series.  (video above) Using the STEEP forecasting methodology, we’ll be viewing the challenges and opportunities for this company through the lenses of Society, Technology, Environment, Economics, and Politics. Each of these five categories will become a short focus video that fleshes out that topic area. The final video will be a big picture overview of the potential pathways for the evolution of Facebook.

by @EricaGlasier

Interviews are still underway, but here’s a look at who we’ve talked to so far:

by @gavinkeech

To launch the public arm of the project, we’ve posted the same 15 questions we asked all interviewees onto Quora. We’ll be monitoring the topic for the most insightful and provocative answers you’ve got. The people with our favorite answers will be invited to participate in an interview with us for inclusion in one of the final videos. You can add your visions to “The Future of Facebook Project” topic here.

We’ve also created a Facebook page, aptly named “Future of This Social Network.” ;) Please follow our developments, video releases, and conversations there as well as on Twitter with the hashtag #fofb.

We hope this will be the first of many upcoming foresight projects that teach us to better harness our collective intelligence to understand complex issues in a way that’s open, collaborative, and fun.

Please help us develop this initiative by supporting the Future of Facebook project on Kickstarter and contributing your thoughts and insights through the various channels listed above.

We’re looking forward to developing Open Foresight with you!

Category: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

venessa miemis

(253 posts)

  • http://freshhorse.wordpress.com x7o

    I deleted my facebook account, and will never ever open a new one.

    • Venessa Miemis

      thanks for sharing. that is certainly a potential future scenario that may come to pass for many, depending on how some things play out.

      • http://freshhorse.wordpress.com x7o

        Yes, I hope so.

        Facebook is intrinsically untrustworthy as a platform for free and open discussion among citizens. As a corporation, there are very few accountability mechanisms for its decisions.

        Twitter’s recent decision to fight an otherwise secret DoJ subpoena for user information – and the complete silence on this point by Facebook and Google – reveals the huge risks of corporate-government complicity.

        A spate of legislative and regulative initiatives, national and transnational, jeopardize the freedom to associate via computer network, the freedom to speak, and the right to continue private communications.

        I sincerely hope that citizens decide that the advantages of facebook do not outweight the disadvantages of being under perpetual surveillance, and refrain from endorsing it. Until facebook is decentralized, private by default, entirely user configurable and supports total encryption, I will not use it, and nobody who values living out of the shadow of tyranny ought either.

        • http://freshhorse.wordpress.com x7o

          In short, most futures I can envisage in which facebook is an unmitigated success are dystopian.

  • THE FREE HUMANIST

    Who has a big stake in Facebook now? Twitter next? http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/02/jpmorgan-chase-reportedly-in-talks-to-buy-minority-share-in-twitter.html

    If you think any media that takes money from corporations particularly those with an agenda to slow or manipulate media coverage what we need is a model more like Wikipedia for freedom of expression.

  • http://benjaminaaron.wordpress.com Benjamin Aaron Degenhart

    awesome! congrats for launching, i am a happy backer :)
    keep us posted about the development of the Open Foresight Process, very interesting!
    looking at the Q’s on Quora and wondering why not a simple question that invites to geek away with possible specific features/functions? maybe not the place to brainstorm on that, i’d understand.

    • Venessa Miemis

      we only posted the same questions on quora that we asked the interviewees.

      thanks for supporting the project!

  • yomismo

    Sorry, but, doesn’t mark zuckerberg have enough money to pay the studies for his company?? Great idea, but I’d try to implement it in other organization.

    • Venessa Miemis

      i’m sure he does.

      in developing the open foresight process, we figured we’d start with a topic with more general / mass appeal, like facebook, before getting into more geeky topics like complex adaptive systems theory or open web standards or the rising peer to peer economy.

      the future of facebook project is a proof of concept.

      gotta start somewhere. :)

      • Katherine Collmer

        Beginning with a topic with “more general/mass appeal” is definitely a great way to get people involved that have limited tech knowledge but do have an interest in the future of communication. As a blogger, I am most interested in the ways that we communicate with each other, and the lost methods that I had treasured (e.g., hearing a person’s voice on the phone or getting a letter in the mail!). Your project can enlighten us to what we should be looking to give up next and looking forward to what may drive communication in the future. Good luck with the project. Will keep watch!

        • Venessa Miemis

          thanks for the kind words, katherine! i hope it will be a fun collective learning experience for all of us!

      • http://socialnode.com Alvis Brigis

        Due to the social importance and complexity of Facebook I think there’s a need for publicly available foresight related to the product so that all the stakeholders – FB, users, developers, investors, researchers, governments, etc – and not just Facebook itself – can make more informed decisions quickly. It’s a powerful platform that’s changing very quickly that many people don’t understand in a comprehensive manner – so gathering insights in an open manner, then distilling them into visual scenarios and roadmaps is, imho, essential to developing our collective public vision of this critical phenomenon.

      • http://www.facebook.com/beautifulsignals Alex Lavigne-Gagnon

        In hindsight, did the “proof of concept” work? Is Open Foresight a viable methodology? I have a hard time seeing how surveying/polling experts or some other segment of the population could ever give any insight into the “Future” of anything. Don’t such questionnaires really only measure the characteristics and/or attitudes of “people”? How can an opinion poll be a research methodology to “gain a better understanding of the risks, opportunities, and implications surrounding the issues important to us”? You might have to do some other kind of research to come to those kinds of conclusions, I would think.

        Sure thing, the method will provide you with a sample of a “wide range of perspectives and viewpoints”, but how exactly does the Open Foresight methodology work? How do you take an opinion poll and gain “Foresight” from it? That really boggles my mind, I’m not judging whether it’s viable or not, that’s why I asked you if the “proof of concept” was successful.

        I am truly curious to know more about how the method works, how a simple opinion poll can provide “critical thinking concerning long-term developments”. Unless of course the opinion poll is to help “shape the future by influencing public policy”. Now this will definitely work, if that’s the case! Policy-makers I’m sure would definitely want to know what people, experts or not, think about the “Future of Facebook”, for instance. Policy-makers want nothing more than to shape policies so that they represent the interests of those who elected them (precisely to represent them!).

        In any case, I wish you success in all your endeavors in the New Year, the best of health , too, and many great moments with those you love. I read your post reflecting on 2011 and laying out your “Roadmap”, if you will, for 2012. I sincerely hope that you accomplish all those things, and much, much more! You’re very talented, you work exceptionally hard, and you deserve to have all those great projects come to fruition.

        In conclusion, say, when can I expect to see The Future of Facebook Project videos? I’m looking forward to seeing them, maybe they will teach me more about the Open Foresight method so that its process is clearer to me. Take care, hope you are well, and once again, Happy New Year to you! :)

        • Venessa Miemis

          ” I have a hard time seeing how surveying/polling experts or some other segment of the population could ever give any insight into the “Future” of anything. Don’t such questionnaires really only measure the characteristics and/or attitudes of “people”? ”

          is the future not shaped by the thoughts and attitudes of people today?

  • alan kelly

    I presume a copy will pop up in the coming months / years that will deal with all the concerns people (including me) have. In fairness the site is an excellent way of keeping in touch, putting forward your views, and sharing content that you know your friends would never discover on their own -because its not in their filed of view. I have motiviated lots of friends to enter into the political sphere by sharing content, WIkileaks being a prime example. Also, I dont think the recent happenings in the middle east could have happened without Facebook.

    For me the idea / platform is world beating, but the companies morals are not so. We all saw a jump from Bebo to Facebook (in my world anyway) because the platform was much better. When a newer, safer, better Facebook comes along people will move immediately!

    • Venessa Miemis

      that sentiment was echoed in several of our interviews – that perhaps facebook will be the next myspace.

      there are a lot of factors at play, many of which we will try to unpack in our videos, so stay tuned!

  • http://www.newmodelminority.com Renina

    Vanessa,

    This sounds awesome.

    Two question’s. Where are the people of color on your list?
    What information will you over look by not looking at women in the global south?

    40% of the world lives on $2/day. The way in which they access the internet, apps and social media, if and when they do, will have huge implications.

    ~Renina

    • Venessa Miemis

      thanks, renina.

      so, to your first question – om malik was born in new delhi and eghosa omoigui is of nigerian descent, i believe. i really don’t know the heritage of the rest of the interviewees. if you have suggestions for experts we should interview, by all means, pass them along.

      to your second question…. i’m not sure i understand the question. the scope of our project includes the implications of mobile devices with internet capability spreading throughout the world, and the potential applications facebook would provide as a part of that analysis.

  • http://g-a-i-a.org Scott Lewis

    Interesting.

    imo, fb is way over valued. When Goldman starts playing, I know they’re preparing to short it when it plummets.

    my experience is that people are using it less and less, especially as businesses start to use it more and more. facebook fatigue is a rising phenomenon: http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/310272

    FB is an advanced party scheduler and contact list. what else does it do, really? Sharing is what people do, no matter which medium they choose to do it in. facebook is only one way of sharing and it is collecting more info about you and your behaviour than many other methods of sharing do.

    • Venessa Miemis

      right… it’s a great address book with pictures, and a useful party guide among friends, as well as a fun place for casual gaming.

      what will be interesting is to see how they might actually facilitate peer 2 peer exchange, allow people to collaborate and create together, build new business models, and generate economic value.

      if they can create a space where people can create abundance and wealth together, and avoid being a place where people are exploited and have value extracted from them, there’s some great potential.

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  • http://twitter.com/uniquevisitor Jeff Pester

    Interesting project – and good luck. I will say I’m a bit leery about “experts” extrapolating current trends years in to the future, no matter the subject matter or discipline. Large, closed systems that attempt to integrate themselves in to every aspect of society have a poor track record. I was especially interested in Om’s statement that “the greatest threat to Facebook is Facebook itself”. I concur.

    As I said earlier today on Twitter: “Facebook is building a Death Star (platform) to rule the galaxy (Internet) through federation. But the Rebellion cometh.” (http://twitter.com/#!/uniquevisitor/statuses/42675624988512256)

    • Venessa Miemis

      we asked all the interviewees to generate scenarios up to 2015.. so only a few years away. of course a lot could change by then, but i think that even the conservative versions still include a lot of material that will probably be very thought provoking and surprising for the average person who isn’t really thinking about the big picture implications yet.

      we’re hoping to inspire some deeper thinking about all the various issues that are shaping the future, as humanity & our technologies continue to co-evolve.

  • CoCreatr

    Wow, Venessa, you and your team are growing at a rapid clip. Really poking the box, to use a recent expression of Seth Godin’s. His new book is about initiative and you sure took it.

    Spreading the word…

    • Venessa Miemis

      thanks, bernd!

  • http://meme-shift.posterous.com/ Pete Touschner

    Venessa, this is awesome.

    • Venessa Miemis

      thanks!

  • gregorylent

    you don’t need “tools”, you need consciousness … crikey, the future is already here in all aspects, just on a subtler level than the senses and mind are accustomed to. use your awareness for what it is for!

    • Venessa Miemis

      well yeah. that’s exactly right. the “tools” we’re referring to here are “critical thinking,” “foresight,” and “imagination.”

    • http://socialnode.com Alvis Brigis

      Consciousness is the ultimate tool, no?

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  • http://www.tenisoakley.net tenis oakley

    I CAN 0nly say awesome project !! I like x70, I deleted my facebook account.

    • Venessa Miemis

      thanks for the props!

  • http://www.alchemyofchange.net/ Gideon Rosenblatt

    This will be a challenging project to manage no doubt, but I like the approach you’re taking and this topic is near and dear to my heart. Facebook is the new computing and communications platform. A few speculations to throw into the pile:

    Netflix and Facebook: http://www.alchemyofchange.net/netflix-and-facebook/
    Twitter and Facebook: http://www.alchemyofchange.net/twitter-is-not-a-social-network/
    Rethinking Facebook’s IPO: http://www.alchemyofchange.net/twitter-is-not-a-social-network/

    Good luck with the project. I’ve subscribed to your blog and just followed you on Twitter to track progress.
    - Gideon

    • Venessa Miemis

      thanks for the links, gideon. (ps – the 2nd & 3rd one are the same)

      i’ve thought about the netflix integration too… i can imagine you’ll be able to watch a netflix movie on your tv, and invite your facebook friends to watch with you live or comment together. or vice versa and be able to watch a netflix movie inside your facebook account via computer or mobile

      • http://www.alchemyofchange.net/ Gideon Rosenblatt

        Oops. Thanks. Here’s that 3rd link on the Facebook IPO:
        http://www.alchemyofchange.net/the-bank-of-facebook/

        So sad to see the company exploring the exact opposite route – working with Goldman Sachs to provide a special channel for elite Goldman Sachs’ clients to get their own privatized IPO.

        One thing to really concentrate on as you all are thinking about the future of Facebook is that many things will change once the company goes public. Shareholders that see the company as simply a way to earn capital gains have a funny way of shifting a company’s focus to supporting stock price and short-term thinking.

        That will be an invisible pressure that shapes everything the company does in the future – even with the very best intentions.

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  • http://www.strategyworks.net Alex Grech

    Wonderful stuff, Venessa! I just completed a Mind Amplifiers course with Howard Rheingold.. and throughout the journey, I kept thinking ‘there’s something wrong about the way we’ve all been herded into the Facebook pen.. when there are so many alternative routes we could take.’ Will be following this with great interest. Any time you need anything, just give me a shout. Alex.

    • Venessa Miemis

      thanks for the encouragement! we’ll be posting updates here and on twitter via my account @venessamiemis & the facebook project account @futureofFB

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  • http://annaholcombe.wordpress.com Anna

    Ah yes great stuff! Was just thinking along these lines about a project like this the other day while I was listening to NPR’s coverage of Libya yesterday morning. And P.S., I just added you to my blogroll at Social Causes Connecting with Profit (http://annaholcombe.wordpress.com/) here in Chicago so others can follow some of this work too!

    • Venessa Miemis

      thank you anna! i’m among good company on that blogroll!

      after this facebook project is done, i’d love to start tackling various social change issues and highlighting the amazing projects out there that are underway and the people who are leading us towards a more positive future

  • Wendy Schultz

    Great topic! for all the reasons stated in the previous comments. I am hoping some of the farther flung people who contribute will identify projects like Diaspora emerging to challenge Facebook that, unlike Diaspora, are being developed by, say, women in Tonga. That would be refreshing.

    In terms of process, specifically foresight process, I do have a few questions. I’m curious that you chose STEEP as a starting point. STEEP is not, in fact, ‘a forecasting methodology’ – it is a taxonomy. As a taxonomy, it may be used to organise the inputs and outputs of a variety of futures / foresight research methods, eg, subsections of scenarios or visions, impact bundles, or scan data like emerging issues, trends, wild cards, etc. But it is not necessarily the best fit as a conceptual organizing structure for this topic. STEEP is usually deployed to classify change by its point of origin.

    Since your topic – and the rest of your process – is all about the social, you might find it more powerful to use Lum and Bowman’s Verge framework, derived from a more ethnographic perspective. Rather than ‘social, technological, environmental, economic, and political,’ the Verge categories are ‘define, relate, connect, create, consume, and destroy.’ For example, for the ‘define’ category, “how will this change affect how humans define themselves, their society, their communities, their families? how will it change basic definitions such as scientific paradigms or business models or spiritual frameworks?”

    Or, if you are not exploring the impacts of a change, but rather attempting to identify emerging changes themselves, then you could ask, “what changes are emerging that will fundamentally transform how people define themselves, their society, paradigms and mental models? etc.” It has the further advantage of digging more deeply into the psychological and cultural substructure of change than STEEP does – which would more greatly endear you to the minds and hearts of the integral futures community. For more information on Verge, contact Richard Lum at Vision Foresight Strategy LLC ( http://www.kikilo.biz/ ) or Michele Bowman at AndSpace Consulting ( http://www.andspaceinc.com/ ). My summary of it, along with a template for discussion and workshop use, is on slideshare here: http://slidesha.re/hEzKKz

    What might also be fun would be crowd-sourcing a Causal Layered Analysis of the future of Facebook. After all, you are essentially collecting the ‘litany’ layer right here in your comments. For a description of CLA and case study examples, see Sohail Inayatullah’s Metafutures: http://www.metafuture.org/causal-layered-analysis-papers.html .

    Best of luck – looking forward to the results.

    • Emile Hooge

      As everybody else, I agree that the topic you have chosen for this foresight work is a great topic : you have got both Facebook users and Facebook quitters interested (and perhaps even Facebook owners!).
      You have also got lots of great people, some famous and some not so famous, to share their vision about Facebook.

      What a good start!

      However, I feel there is one aspect of your project that has been overlooked by most of the comments above (apart from Wendy’s very useful contribution just above): the methodology of your futures work.
      In the first few lines of your post, you speak of Open Foresight as “an updated model for harvesting collective insight, generating scenarios, and creating strategic roadmaps into the future”. Your goal is set and well in line with your topic but I really would love to read more about how you are planning to do that. And perhaps we could also help you by discussing about that too.

      For example, perhaps you could check out (if not already done) Noah Raford’s work on large-scale participatory futures systems http://news.noahraford.com/?p=487 or simply speak with him about his experience in crowdsourcing futures work.

      Wendy’s suggestions are also really worth digging into. I quite agree with here that trying out different frameworks from STEEP could lead you to deeper understanding of your topic.

      Finally, I hope I wont appear as the boring guy who speaks about methodology rather than all the fun stuff we can say about Facebook. Believe me we can have fun with foresight methodology too. Just think of Wendy’s suggestion about Causal Layered Analysis (drawing from poststructuralism, Tantric epistemology and futures studies)!

      Have fun with the project and keep us updated on the results!

      Emile

      • Wendy Schultz

        “…For example, perhaps you could check out (if not already done) Noah Raford’s work on large-scale participatory futures systems http://news.noahraford.com/?p=487 or simply speak with him about his experience in crowdsourcing futures work….”

        Just so, Emile! Actually, I am working with Noah on that distributed process design, and topics like this are well-suited to beta test it.

      • Venessa Miemis

        hi emile,

        as i just responded to wendy as well – we are open and welcome to all methodologies / frameworks out there. we’re excited to elevate the ‘futures thinking’ meme and bring these methods out of the field of Futures Studies and into the mainstream

    • Venessa Miemis

      thanks wendy,

      great suggestions! alvis & i are just working on an upcoming post ‘ What is Open Foresight?’ to lay it out. then we are going to do one on ‘Open Foresight Methodologies’….

      essentially a collection of futures methods and frameworks…. we started with STEEP as an entrypoint for all this, but we’re going to list out as many thinking tools / mental models as we can.

      so STEEP, Verge, CLA, backcasting, delphi, etc etc.

      it’s ‘open’ foresight after all, so we want to highlight all the great techniques that are out there

      thanks again for the valuable feedback and suggestions

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  • Russell Bishop

    finding your material fascinating, and, having trouble with the audio on the Future of fb videos. Is there something you can do about this – I don’t thing the problem is at my end. Thank you!!