A Thousand Cassandras
A report for Open Society Foundations, exploring the connections between foresight and digital power.
What is the role of digital rights and campaigning organisations in understanding the future?
Written in 2022 for Open Society Foundations (OSF), in collaboration with Mallory Knodel, this report explores how digital rights organisations use foresight, and offers a review of a number of approaches to foresighting. Read the report (PDF) >
The exam question for this piece of work was to explore how digital rights organisations might make better use of foresight. After undertaking desk research and qualitative interviews with people from think tanks, futures labs, research and training institutes, industry, aid organisations and advocacy projects we found that digital rights organisations do, frequently, make excellent use of foresight and in fact tend to act as bellwethers, drawing early attention to the risks and harms created by technologies.
The problem we observed through our research was not that digital rights organisations do not practice foresight or raise the concerns they uncover, it is that these concerns are often overlooked by both policymakers and funders. Redressing this imbalance requires an active renegotiation of power and resources, and an acknowledgement of the importance of multiples approaches to seeing, knowing and understanding.
What is the role of digital rights and campaigning organisations in forecasting the future?
© 2023 Open Society Foundations
Get involved
We are multidisciplinary practitioners in policy and strategy who help weave caring and thoughtful future ideas and recommendations. We practise a unique foresight methodology called relational foresight that involves more voices and builds fairer ideas for the future. We believe foresight can be used to plan for and develop better long term futures in a caring and inclusive way. We work with clients to tackle future facing problems, both at a project level and at an organisational level, using both bespoke foresight methods and workshops as well as through advisory outputs. If you’d like to be involved, we’d love to talk to you.
If you’d like to keep up with the work of the Futures team, please sign up to our newsletter