Institute For The Future

Governance Futures Lab heads to Personal Democracy Forum 2014

UPDATE: We've added a video of David Evan Harris' talk on Leapfrog Democracies at the Personal Democracy Forum 2014 below.

How can we redesign the structures around us to better represent our values?

This question has become even more relevant in light of the events of the past year—from Snowden’s revelations to Ukraine’s social unrest. On June 5-6, at Personal Democracy Forum in New York, the world’s leading practitioners in governance and technology will be looking to address the topic “Save the Internet / The Internet Saves.”

In this context, IFTF’s Governance Futures Lab will bring its ideas and tools of governance design to New York City—offering a workshop on our Social Inventor's Toolkit and giving a talk on the possibilities of emerging leapfrog democracies.

We are witnessing the rise of a global movement to rethink the relationship between citizens and governance, and the tools that fuel a social inventor’s mindset matter more than ever. Now is the time to explore the widest range of future possibilities and to reimagine society for an age of planetary challenges and human responsibility.

First, IFTF’s David Evan Harris will take the main stage at PDF to talk about Leapfrog Democracies: From Tunis to Tallinn, and Quito too (UPDATE: video included above). He asks, could the world’s newest democracies “leapfrog” their older cousins, implementing new technologies and practices of governance that transform the field of governance globally? At the Institute for the Future’s Governance Futures Lab, we are finding an increasing number of signals indicating that some of the most path-breaking innovations in democracy over the coming decades may come from nations that are unencumbered by their own legacy systems of democracy.

Then on June 6th, during a 2.5-hour workshop, PDF participants will experience a four-step process to investigate, re-think, design, and prototype new forms of governance on topics ranging from governance on Mars, to redesigning a just NSA.

We look forward to seeing many of you there!