Recently, a few Romanian and foreign experts from Europe, Asia
and U.S. gathered in Bucharest to launch the first wiki platform
for the global community of foresight experts: ForWiki. The
international online platform - in English - has been developed by
the Romanian foresight specialists, as a result of the project
"Quality and Leadership for Romanian Higher Education". The
launching event took place at the workshop "Jointly Shaping and
Launching the Foresight Wiki". We have tried to find out more
details about the subject from two of the participants: Dr. Philine
Warnke (Germany), workshop coordinator, and Dr. Ziauddin Sardar,
writer, journalist, editor (Futures, multidisciplinary
journal published by Elsevier) and professor at The City
University, London, United Kingdom. Tomorrow's science and
transdisciplinarity, the attitude toward future, the role of
history in the study of the future, and what is to be done for
shaping a future closer to our desires - these were the topics
discussed. Finally, both discussions have the very same conclusion:
the group intelligence is shaping the future.
Dr.
Ziauddin Sardar is one of the leading Britain intellectuals. A
simple Google search revealed almost 60,000 pages mentioning his
name. In 30 years he wrote or edited 45 books. He has worked as
journalist for Nature and New Scientist. His research interests are
vast "ranging from Islamic studies and futures studies to science
policy, literary criticism, and information science to cultural
relations, art criticism and critical theory" as it is written on
his official site.
What can you say about ForWiki platform?
Dr. Ziauddin Sardar: "It is a project for the community of
people who think about the future."
So, the targeted people are specialists...
Dr. Ziauddin Sardar: "Most simply, it is a project about all
varieties of people who think about the future, who practice what
we call foresight. ForWiki is a portal for those people who are
professionally interested in the future in different ways."
Experts write articles, develop scenarios but society is made
also of ordinary people. So, what we should know about future?
Dr. Ziauddin Sardar: "Future is not something that you have to
wait. It is something that you can share and it is something that
you can act about about in this very moment. It is all about
action. Let me give you just one example: if you want to do
something about the climate change you should use less energy. The
time of the action is now."
Generally speaking, the Bucharest workshop was about theory,
practice and living in a knowledge society. What kind of society is
envisioned?
Dr. Ziauddin Sardar: "This is the point! Different futurists
will have different visions of the society. It is not a single
vision. It is very much a pluralistic exercise. The emphasis is on
alternative future, what is going to happen in 10 - 20 years time.
Need not be simply an extension of what is happening today. It
could be different things but the possibilities are vast. And we
want to know the possibilities and to choose the desirable
possibilities to move towards."
... To be prepared...
Dr. Ziauddin Sardar: "To be prepared for that and also to create
opportunities to move in that direction. Our purpose is to explore
these variations and see how we can best realize them and how we
can have a common agreement amongst different visions of the
future, come up with something that is based on wisdom of consensus
and create some sort of patterns and some sort of direction towards
desirable future. And you do this in a number of ways. Foresight is
just one matter; the emphasis is on exploration. So, it is an
exercise of imagination, an exercise of using objective matters to
acquire subjective results."
Coming back to the workshop, what is the news that the workshop
brings into attention? There are lessons learned, there are next
steps to be taken...
Dr. Ziauddin Sardar: "I think the main message is that future needs
our attention. Urgently! Future is not something that we can just
leave and not worry about. There are some many things now going
wrong in society, there are so many complexities that we do need to
pay attention to what is happening in terms of the direction we
have taking. And be concern about it. If we look at the numbers of
things all the last couple of years: huge financial crisis,
economic meltdown, serious concern with swine flu, climate change;
a volcano has erupted recently; so, things are much interconnected.
We need to be conscious about what is happening, we need to study
them all the time and be aware of what is happening and we have to
develop strategies, methods, systems so that we can move away from
the highway to disaster and go to a more desirable future."
Let us imagine that we are at 2025 time horizon. How is the
future in your opinion?
Dr. Ziauddin Sardar: "I always said that there is no one answer;
at the very least there could be two answers.... "
...The good and the bad scenarios; cold and hot; sweet and
bitter...
Dr. Ziauddin
Sardar: "Precisely. My thesis is that it is not good having a
hot and a cold answer. What tends to happen are things in between.
And it is the things in between which are more interesting. And
these things you cannot just come up instantly. They have to be
studied and discovered. The hot and cold answer I can create just
by sitting here. But the area in between I need to study to act,
and to put into practice. That's the message: don't seat there and
assume the best or assume the worst, go out and study all the
possible things that can happen in between and act to create
them."
The Bucharest workshop was coordinated by Dr. Philine Warnke,
researcher at the Competence Center Innovation and Technology
Management and Foresight from the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems
and Innovation Research, Germany. We have tried to find out how
science will look in the future. Especially, if transdisciplinary
science is the natural consequence of the interdisciplinary science
of today.
Dr. Philine
Warnke: "I am not sure it will be the next step but I think it
should be. That it is what is really needed at the moment. I am not
sure it's really going in this direction but I think this is what
it's really urgently needed: not interdisciplinarity but
transdisciplinarity in new sense".
Do you have an example? What is the researchers' reaction to
this?
Dr. Philine Warnke: "Everybody's saying 'you have a point
because there is something we're always miss, something in between;
for example, we set a human-machine cooperation, so that should be
one transdisciplinary perspective because we have all these new
technologies... they say yes, it's a good idea but the problem is
to implement this because communities they don't even talk, they do
not have a common language".
What about the workshop in Bucharest?
Dr. Philine Warnke: "I really felt that was a community of
practitioners, something that we're always talking about and here
it really emerged and it really became reality."
So being together all the experts was the strongest point of the
workshop.
Dr. Philine Warnke: "Everybody was supportive and trying not to
criticise; and if they were critical they also came with
alternative solutions to improve things or do things in a different
way"
New members will join and the community will grow. How can an
expert of the past be involved in the study of the future?
Dr.
Philine Warnke: "We always say that is very important to
foresight to talk about the future to understand the past. There
are historians of technology that tell us that technology doesn't
grow like patterns tell us."
The two dialogues have in common the idea that seems to be
unique, at least in terms of how the day of tomorrow should be
judged with responsibility: the group intelligence is shaping the
future.
Notes:
Interviews were taken on Friday, April 16, immediately after the
workshop "Launching and Jointly Shaping the Foresight Wiki. For
more details about the Bucharest's workshop click here.
For Futures magazine click
here.
For more info about the project "Quality and Leadership for
Romanian Higher Education" click here.
For FORwiki platform visit www.forwiki.ro