Hi Futurists,

Two items FYI:

1. Our new Yahoo! Group, North American Future Salon - Talk already has 50 members from across the US and Canada, and is getting great introduction posts and news items.  Hope you can join and add your passion and insight to the conversation!

2. We've just posted Futures Studies - Programs and Resources  at the ASF website. This is an annotated list of all the global programs in Futures Studies we've been able to find to date.  Thanks to Martin Andersen for his research help on that. We made the page because there was no one place on the web that listed all the most promising places where one might get formal interdisciplinary training in thinking about the future. We'd love to rank these programs, and that would be a good task for an enterprising student (of one of the FS programs perhaps) or ASF volunteer.

By my count there are only four PhD and ten MS programs today that can be considered primary programs, and we listed another forty-one (I'm sure there are more) that we consider good secondary programs. That's a lot fewer primary programs than we might expect, given that it's been 32 years since the first FS program (Houston, 1975) emerged. Still, it could have been worse, at least some growth has occurred.

I think there are two main problems keeping the number of programs so low. The first is that we don't yet have a strong global culture of foresight, even in the developed world, so it's hard to convince academia and the public of the value of futures studies programs.  I think the second problem is that the programs themselves haven't done a good enough job of improving their curriculum, admissions standards, and marketing to students.

In a world of accelerating change, the value of futures studies just gets greater every year, so the onus is on us to start networking, improving, and promoting these programs. ASF will do its small part in that regard, and if any of you want to help out on any aspect of that feel free to contact me off list.

Also, I'm sure our list is still incomplete, especially for secondary programs, so if you know others that aren't listed, or have page edits or additions for the current list, please email me.

Thanks!

JS