Future Agenda

Website Scoping

Another good meeting at CI KTN scoping out the shared website structure. Looking very positive in terms of both ease of navigation and content access. Challenge is to make sure we have consistency between book and website now that both are well underway.

Website Partnership Go Ahead

A joint development of the platform for the Future Agenda website is now all approved and scoping underway. Providing a different means of interaction with all the content and insights from the programme that will be possible with the book, this website will, we hope, provide a class leading experience. So, we are collaborating on the underlying platform design with the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network to provide a common framework upon which different sites can be layered. Should be an interesting and challenge development programme but a great team has been assembled so feeling good about the journey. Thanks to John Cass for setting this up. Key scoping meeting taking place later this week.

Blog Split

Have just popped into Vodafone to catch up with Karl and Bnay on way back from other meetings. We had a good chat about the recent site upgrade and how flow of material is improving access and reach. But, also recognise that more to be done – especially in terms of sharing relevant views in the most appropriate places.

So, in order that comments on topics can be better related to Future Agenda content, we have decided to split this blog into two: From now on, views that I have gleaned from ongoing discussions with people and views that are shared as we run all these workshops over the next three months will be posted direct onto a new commentary blog on the main Future Agenda site. This will help visitors see the linkages and create a more dynamic regular update of debate and also allow us to feature and so highlight different topics on a day by day basis. Consequence of this shift is that this blog will be the one which keeps my personal comments about the programme, who is involved, how things are lining up, what is working and how all the varied activities are working and linking together.

CNBC Coverage - 20 Insights on 2020

CNBC invited us to do a guest blog on Future Agenda highlighting the key insights for 2020 from the programme so far. So here it is. Gives an overview of background to programme, current status and sample insights. More later today on the global media launch but great to have this up - great timing and many thanks to Gloria et al in New Jersey!

Website Upgrade ahead of Media Launch

The big media launch kicks off on Monday and so, based on feedback from the pilot phase, we have upgraded with core futureagenda website. Well, actually Karl and Bnay at Vodafone have worked their magic! Several key changes already visible and more tweaks to come. Foremost homepage navigation is easier with icons as links to key topic areas providing alternative means of accessing core content. In the side bar there are a host of goodies including most popular comments complete with voting, popular posts, tag cloud, links to Twitter etc. At the same time ease of taking feeds from the site has improved and design tweak to the header to fit in with the evolving style. More on way but great step forward that will hopefully work well as more people are drawn to the site over the next weeks.

Birth Control and Climate Change

This article in The Times on Thursday is clearly stirring up some lively debate. Entitled 'Birth control: the most effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions' and appearing in the environment section, it basically argues that, given that population growth leads to the need for more energy, more food, more transport etc etc, then one should consider policies to moderate fertility rates as part of the solution to global warming:

"Investing in birth control to reduce population growth could be more effective in cutting greenhouse gas emissions than building wind turbines or nuclear power stations, according to a United Nations report. Taking action to prevent one billion births by 2050 would save as much carbon dioxide as constructing 2 million giant wind turbines."

The report cited is this onefrom the United Nations Population Fund which seeks to answer questions such as: How do population dynamics affect greenhouse gases and climate change? Will urbanisation and an ageing population help or hinder efforts to adapt to a warming world? And could better reproductive health care and improved relations between women and men make a difference in the fight against climate change?

The main element of the argument is that empowered women will make a difference. Better educated women produce less children: Women who have never gone to school have an average of 4.5 children. Those who complete one or two years of university have 1.7.

The comments that the article is generating on the TimesOnline site cover a wide range and highlight some of the issues here that people will take in different ways. Early samples include:

"At last its in the papers the great taboo - and the answer is called voluntary family planning"

"A solution otherwise known as eugenics"

"China has done far more for the planetary environment with its one child/family policy than any other country."

"Something is wrong when a "green ideology" supersedes the human need to procreate."

"It's obvious that overpopulation is the cause of a lot of the world's problems.... If we humans can't figure that out, then shame on us."

Progress So Far

Two weeks after launch, I thought it would be interesting to see who is reading the material on the varied Future Agenda sites. With a programme like this (global, open and broad), you never know how quickly people will join in and to what level – will there be thousands of comments straight away or will it be a gradual build up? So, to date, over 1100 people have visited the core futureagenda.org site from around the world: Half from the UK and 200 from the US as one would expect, but also 65 from India, 38 from Australia and over 30 from each of Netherlands, Switzerland, France and Germany. On top of this, there have been several visitors from most other countries including most notably Egypt, Singapore, South Korea and Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Indonesia. So, not bad global coverage – be interesting to see how this pattern scales over the next few weeks as more people get to know about the programme. Over half of this is direct traffic, around 25% is coming from Google and quite a few from Twitter – where over 130 people are now following the programme. In terms of comments added to the initial perspectives, to date we have 29 which is above the expected 1 in a 100 – but early days… At the same time, over 500 people have now viewed the full pdf of the initial perspectives on slide-share and just under 500 have viewed the summary ppt. Lastly, 230 people so far have read this blog (mostly from the UK and US) and several people have subscribed to regular feeds. With the addition of futureagenda facebook and youtube channels, it will be interesting to see which of these multiple alternative connections have the greatest impact in advance of the main media coverage.

White House on Future of Food

Reviewing insights being suggested for the Future of Food debate, we came across this clip on the White House blog. Looking at the key challenges and opportunities ahead, it highlights how a 1% temperature increase from global warming will decrease food productivity by 10%, that water scarcity is also forecast to decrease global food productivity by 10%; and that to cope with expanded population growth we need a 50% increase in food supply over the next 20 years. The accompanying text on the blog post highlights some of the changes the US administration is seeking to encourage to address these challenges.