Links to other conversations

FUTUROLOGY

Institutional Sites The Univ of Hawai'i at Manoa has a famous institute for Futures Studies. Debora Halbert does some good activist/feminist stuff there. Below is an overview of the field. [1]

The Institute for Alternative Futures makes this into a money-spinning consultancy gig! I can't quite figure out the politics of how this kind of pro-poor work actually functions: [2]

SF and Future Thinking The SF-encyclopaedia has a page on Futures Studies. It's not very well footnoted, but it makes useful links, pointing to the often-conservative politics of future-oriented thinking (from Thomas Malthus to Donella Meadows), and linking it to Science Fiction, as well as to a military-industrial-imperialist set of political concerns [3]

OPEN-SOURCE

Open Source Education [4]

Open Source Design If The Economist is onto it, you know it's mainstream now! And no surprises, they want to figure out how to profit: "The big question is how to profit from all of this fevered making. Does open-source design risk breaking the link between intellectual property and value, and doing to designers what the internet did to music and journalism? http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/11/open-source-design?fb_ref=activity