Future Portal: The Collaborative Encyclopedia of the Future

The ripple effect of a small twist can sink a great ship or let a dark horse win. Futures studies try to find these tiny but critical twists to pave the way for stakeholders' preferable futures. In this paper, we explore the design and implementation of an online collaborative encyclopedia. The Future Portal is a free encyclopedia intended to aggregate futuristic entries. We describe an information architecture and its implementation that facilitates the futurecasting and experiencing of future scenarios. We then introduce a collectiveintelligence based method for evaluating futuristic knowledge creations. This encyclopedic approach promotes the interaction between future thinkers and eases access to information about different paths to the future.

Keywords:

Futures Studies , Collective Intelligence , Encyclopedia , WordPress , Information Architecture