Friday, March 25, 2016

Global Trends - National Intelligence Council

The NIC is crowd sourcing the next Global Trends report.  Everyone has the opportunity to comment at this link: https://nicglobaltrends.tumblr.com/submit-a-post

Some important concepts here:

• The public will have the opportunity to comment on the NIC’s “first look” and refined language through August.
In addition to analytic crowdsourcing, other important shifts in our methodology and research design include:
• Building up from the regions to identify global trends and uncertainties, rather than starting from the global level and moving to the local;
• Assessing the future at five- and 20-yearsWe intend the five-year horizon to increase the decisionmaking relevance of Global Trends for individuals, organizations, and governments, while the 20-year horizon preserves the strategic perspective that is the hallmark of the Global Trends series.  


Here are a few of the questions I would like to see the Global Trends address:

What will the phenomena revolution, resistance, and insurgency look like in 30 years?

What will political violence look like?

What is the future of governance structures?

Will we still be supporting and defending our current Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic in 20-30years?

Will we evolve beyond the Westphalian nation state construct?  How will sovereignty be viewed?  Will their be new forms of "sovereignty" e.g., can multi-national corporations evolve to become sovereign?  

Can sovereignty exist within cyberspace?

Will statesmen be asking upon what kind of war are we about to embark?  What will that war look like?

What will the concepts of offense, defense, stability operations as well as sabotage and subversion look like?

What will be the major narratives of states and non-state actors?

What kind of population and resources control measures will be emplace to control larger populations and declining resources?

HTTPS://NICGLOBALTRENDS.TUMBLR.COM/POST/141610120692/WITH-EVERY-GLOBAL-TRENDS-THE-NATIONAL
MAR 24, 2016
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With every Global Trends, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) seeks to innovate its approach, leverage rigorous foresight methods, and expand and diversify the perspectives it consults.  We continue in that tradition for the sixth Global Trends, to be released in December, by introducing several new elements to our analytic process, including public crowdsourcing and discussion via social media platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook.  We treat crowdsourced perspectives as analytic leads to investigate and that we may integrate with findings from traditional forms of unclassified research and engagement—such as meetings with interlocutors, conferences, published research, contracted studies, public presentations, and paid consultations.   When arranged in advance, we provide compensation for some of these services.  We seek to maximally diversify the range of viewpoints consulted, attempting to balance the elite perspectives we typically consult worldwide with societal perspectives across genders and age, class, cultural, and other groups in urban and rural areas.  Such public engagement is one way the NIC and its parent organization, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, demonstrate commitment to transparency and strategic insight.  
• We experimented in 2015 with analytic crowdsourcing in conjunction with our Global Trends “core conversation” at the South by Southwest Interactive festival, garnering hundreds of thoughts from SX participants and Twitter followers as well several million views of the NIC’s “future of” vignettes on on Tumblr and Twitter.  
• In mid-March 2016, we returned to SXSW and posted on Tumblr a first look at our findings, resulting in more than 10 million views of our content across social media platforms and hundreds of insights and several longer essays shared on these pages.  
• For instance, SXSW and Twitter commentators challenged the NIC to strike the term “non-state actor” from its lexicon, in an effort to get the NIC to stop “seeing like a state” and to envision how individuals and organizations might shape the future of economics, politics, security, and geopolitics.  Others have suggested the NIC explore new or alternative economic models that have the potential to shore-up middle classes worldwide, or to weigh the geopolitical and economic implications of “solving climate change.”  
• The public will have the opportunity to comment on the NIC’s “first look” and refined language through August.
In addition to analytic crowdsourcing, other important shifts in our methodology and research design include:
• Building up from the regions to identify global trends and uncertainties, rather than starting from the global level and moving to the local;
• Assessing the future at five- and 20-years. We intend the five-year horizon to increase the decisionmaking relevance of Global Trends for individuals, organizations, and governments, while the 20-year horizon preserves the strategic perspective that is the hallmark of the Global Trends series.  
• Leveraging two rounds of global engagement, the first in pure “discovery” mode where we met with more than 1800 individuals, organizations, and governments in 30 countries to learn their views of the future.  The second phase, underway now, solicits feedback on our preliminary findings.
• Using scenarios in a targeted fashion to illustrate how a handful of critical trends, uncertainties, and choices might come together to challenge enduring principles in international decisionmaking, or to spotlight pathways to more prosperous, secure futures for more people.  
• Framing uncertainties, where possible, as specific choices before individuals, organizations and governments.
Please keep an eye on these Tumblr pages or follow-us on Twitter and Facebook.  We welcome viewpoints from one and all, and will do our best to consider your ideas as we evaluate how the key trends, uncertainties, and choices before individuals, organizations, and governments will shape the future.
Warm regards,
The NIC Global Trends Team

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