View source for Digital Futures Workshop: Future and Present Snapshots


==Triggering Questions==
What do we imagine life in Europe to be like in 2050?  
What are the digital futures we imagine will allow us to co-create relevant and adaptable policies for Europe - with citizens, member states, sectors, regions, Europe wide?

==The organizing team==
# Franco Accordino
# Afonso Ferreira
# Ursula Hillbrand
# Carmen Ianosi
# Matthieu Kleinschmager
# Bernadett Koteles
# Isabel Martinez-Gantes
# Sophie Mercier
# Jan Hein Nielsen
# Maria Scordialos
# Helen Titchen Beeth
# Adam Watson-Brown


March 29th - 30th, 2012
Charlemagne Building, Room "Jean Durieaux"


The purpose of the two days we will be to embark on a journey to discover potential digital futures that will:

(1) Create a paradigm change in policy making practices to be more proactive, agile and anticipatory

(2) Inspire future Commission's strategic choices related to ICT and beyond

As mentioned in our previous message, this workshop will be designed to be fully participatory, so you can expect to be actively engaged with fellow experts from a wide range of different fields and disciplines, as well as members of Commission staff, throughout our time together.

This will take place through a series of strategic conversations which will be designed so that one conversation builds on the next.  We will not have key note speeches as we wish to harness the knowledge of all experts (about 80 confirmed) as well as imagine potential futures together. We will be using methodologies that will activate and amplify our collective intelligence. The structure of the brainstorming exercise will be introduced at the very beginning of the workshop.

Answering these questions may not be obvious and will require the contributions of many experts. The visioning exercise will continue till the end of 2013 through further engagement activities addressing the above questions.

This workshop is a kick-off for a broader engagement process that will see Digital Futures gradually building a community that will instigate forward-looking and adaptable policies for Europe. Our future online engagement platform is itself conceived to be co-developed to enable co-creation of ideas from this workshop and beyond. For the time being and as a basic web presence for the project you can refer to the following web site: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital_futures/index_en.htm



We can better shape our responses to each of the scenarios if we recognise the constraining forces that are beyond our control. 

A scenario is not a specific forecast of the future, but a plausible description of what might happen. Scenarios are like stories built around carefully constructed plots based on trends and events. They assist in selection of strategies, identification of possible futures, making people aware of uncertainties and opening up their imagination and initiating learning processes.

* http://www.futurescenarios.org/
* http://www.acunu.org/millennium/techscen.html#Future%20S&T%20Management
* http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Fail-Succeed/dp/0143036556/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260554031&sr=1-1
* http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/scenarios/