Institute For The Future

Update on the Grassroots Economy

"In case you didn't catch the article in the most recent issue of BusinessWeek, "The Power of Us" recaps many of the ideas and examples we were exploring at the Ten Year Forecast annual meeting. In the meantime, we've been moving ahead on a couple fronts:

We're continuing to develop the methodology for modeling the impact of open economies on GDP. The BW article quotes John Roberts of SugarCRM Inc. as saying (gleefully): "We're turning a $10 billion market space into a $1 billion market space." This is precisely the kind of phenomenon we want to capture and work into into a macroeconomic forecast. We're starting with analyses of telecommunications, publishing and broadcasting, computing, leisure time, education, and utilities. For each sector, we'll try to develop a Nominal scenario that assumes a basic replacement of some traditional value by the new grassroots value; we'll also create a Radical scenario that takes into account the possibility of complete restructuring of the sector or subsector. For example, the Nominal scenario for voice communications would track the rate at which IP telephony is replacing POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service). The Radical scenario might involve spectrum re-farming—the opening up of radio spectrum so that bandwidth is essentially unlimited. We'll be creating a public wiki space to engage a variety of points of view in this project.

We're also making great progress on the work we started in our Tech Horizons program last year to build a literacy of cooperative strategy. Howard Rheingold (quoted in the BusinessWeek article) is the driving force behind this project, which will eventually build a knowledge commons for academic leaders and business practitioners to share their perspectives on when and how cooperative strategies work best--and what they mean for everything from business models to the future of nation-states. As part of this project, we've been working with Paul Hartzog on a new set of open source tools to support a knowledge commons more effectively than traditional databases; meanwhile, Andrea Saveri and Howard are busy culling key findings from a vast literature and synthesizing the results into learning models on such topics as Social Dilemmas, Technologies of Cooperation, and Alternative Property Regimes. Watch for two new reports on technologies of cooperation and rapid decision-making by distributed teams in the next few months.

As always, we're looking for support for various pieces of this work, so if you'd like to be more closely involved in some of this research, please contact Kathi or Howard.

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