Digital Futures, European Commission

Today I hit the road again to Brussels for an EC Digital Futures foresight workshop.

Here's the plan:

The workshops will address the following four elements:

a) Visions describing possible futures (i.e. snapshots of the world in the future), with perceived likelihood and year of maturity (if and when the visions would materialise), desirability, and impacts associated to them.

b) Trends identifying complex phenomena observable today that may have an influence on the futures, either directly or because they would lead to intermediate situations that would in turn generate other trends affecting 2040-50's scenarios.

c) Issues stemming from the envisaged futures, i.e. possible opportunities and risks that can be associated to them.

Furthermore, the workshops will identify opportunities for intervention to shape the above visions, together with associated actors ('implementers'), and possibly roadmap sketches towards the futures. These will then be translated intopolicy options underpinning possible paths to the futures.