Now is a good time to think about how we think about the future.

This is not so much a weeknote as a “two-year note” — an attempt to pull together the different strands of work we’re doing at Careful Industries and our (very new) not-for-profit arm, Promising Trouble and explain why we’re doing it.

What kind of imagery might help us think about possible ways to visualise our Observatory?

Explaining what we’re trying to do, seeing how our ideas land with others, and getting feedback on what shape(s) the project might take moving forward

Foresight is excessively top down and that we should be moving towards a plurality of futures, where more people can have a say in producing and participating in the creation of multiple futures.

We are trying to do something different than many other foresight projects we’ve seen before.

We have created the Glimmers Toolkit to aid recovery for civil society organisations, and are calling for a Community Tech Stack, so the future of digital social infrastructure is not dependent on either big technology platforms or start-up “unicorns”.

There is an opportunity to regroup, to rethink structures, and to create imaginative solutions that set out a better future for more people.

Dealing with the practical difficulties of a coming recession will be tough; getting through it requires a shared, consistent and positive future for a post-Covid world.

Some dreams and ideas about the potential for the ways communities, activists and others can influence how technology is shaped.

A scrapbook of links and questions that explore how civil society might be in a digital world. How can non-technical experts get messy with technology?

This blog post introduces Glimmers, a collaborative research project led by Careful Industries and Plot.