The Futurium is up. Let's co-create the futures we all want!

The coming two years will be crucial for the design of a comprehensive strategy for the European Union. This strategy will have to respond to the expectation of the tax payers, serving their needs and not the other way around.

People want research investments and policies to help addressing the societal challenges of today and tomorrow. In order to know better which challenges we should focus on, we need your help.

We are launching the Futurium, our online lab where stakeholders, experts and non-experts, can co-create ideas for future European policies by drawing inspiration not only from today's trends, but especially from desirable futures.

Futurium is based on the metaphor of "collective brain" (or emergent collective intelligence), according to which stakeholders form a social network to co-create policy ideas on the basis of the scientific evidence elicited from real world data (e.g. through statistics) and the collective aspirations of the participants measurable through the social network.

Futurium aims at capturing the contributions of the citizens in a way that is usable and close to their expectations. It combines the informal character of social networks with the methodological rigour of foresights to engage stakeholders in the co-creation of the futures that we want.

What are the distinctive features of Futurium?

• It is based on a model that defines the format of the content (visions, trends, policy ideas, evidence, etc.) and the workflow
• It has a self-organising and spontaneous character just like social networks.
• It values the contribution of all through a wiki approach that reqards creativity and quality
• It enables the mining of meaningful knowledge to inform the policy debate

Futurium is an experimental endeavour. We launch it today but its features and content are improved ad expanded over time. It's open architecture allows for contributions by anyone. If you are interested to contribute, please read the post: "Time to experiment with new policy making models"

Futurium will host the content produced by Digital Futures for about one year. By them we will hopefully co-create many visions and ideas for possible future policies to be offered as 'hints' to the next EU programming cycle.

• What do you envision Europe will be like in 2050?
• How does daily life look like in 2050?
• How your policy ideas could help achieving the envisaged futures?

Your active and creative engagement is essential to make this experimental endeavour successful.

Keep in touch on the Futurium!