The Global Futures Intelligence System
ORGANIZATION NAME: The Millennium Project
LOCATION: Washington D.C., USA
SUMMARY: A new collective intelligence system for humanity to think together about the future in a holistic, synergistic, systematic, organized on-line platform, that helps manage the knowledge explosion and allows feedback on strategies, priorities, insights, methods, and research on 15 global challenges, focusing on the signals not trivia and info overload.
PROBLEM SPACE: Society – locally and globally – is too fragmented, polarized, and uninformed about our global situation and prospects for the future to work in a more coherent, synergistic, loving way. We need a way to see the integrated big picture backed-up by continually updated data, research, and informed judgments that allows for a range of views on insights and strategies. GFIS is a new way to integrate ideas, programs, research, news, models, and data on a global and local basis to help people create more integrated strategy
SOLUTION: The Global Futures Intelligence System (GFIS) is a unique software system that resides in the Amazon Cloud (hence, we can scale up fast without notice). The system is custom built and hosted on Amazon EC2 Ubuntu instances. The JavaScript is not just front-end, the backend is built with Node.JS. Much work has been done on system stability; system load speed; security; and mobile capabilities. We have also programmed the system on which that code runs. Each of 15 Global Challenges has the same 11 item menu: RSS news feed aggregater, annotated scanning items promoted from news items or added by bookmarklets and reviewers and staff, situation chart (current situation, desired situation, policies to address the gap), report (overview and long text, data, charts), web resources, books, papers, questions, comments, data sets (not yet implemented), models, dashboard/digest, and edit history. People around the world can comment on any piece of information, suggest edits, and through a quick review process can change any part of the system. Our 55 Node chairs around the world will be trained in how to introduce it in their countries.