Hi SD Futurists,

Two items FYI:

1. Our new Yahoo! Group, North American Future Salon - Talk
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nafsntalk/> 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
<http://accelerating.org/gradprograms.html> 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


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