World Future Society

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The World Future Society has been around for 40 years. It holds conferences and publishes a range of magazines, journals and digital newsletters aimed to assist people and organizations to think about global and personal futures. Founded in 1966 as a nonprofit educational and scientific organization in Bethesda, Maryland, U.S., the World Future Society (WFS) investigates how social, economic and technological developments are shaping the future. It helps individuals, organizations, and communities observe, understand, and respond to social change appropriately and effectively applying anticipatory thinking practices.

Through its magazine The Futurist, media, meetings, and dialogue among its members, it raises awareness of change and encourages development of creative solutions. The society takes no official position on what the future may or should be like. Instead it provides a neutral forum for exploring possible, probable, and preferable futures.

Contents

[edit] Members

The World Future Society has about 25,000 members distributed world-wide in more than eighty countries. Individuals and groups from all nations are eligible to join this society and actively engage in its programs and events. The Society’s annual conference provides opportunities to meet and greet fellow thinkers and to take one- or two-day courses dealing with the future.

Chapters of the World Future Society are active in cities around the world. Chapters offer speakers, educational courses, seminars, and other opportunities for regional members to meet and collaborate. Local WFS Chapters give members a chance to interact with forward-looking peers and to discuss diverse topics about the future.

Membership is open to anyone who wishes to join and can afford it. Members come from all walks of life. Their disciplines include sociologists, scientists, corporate planners, educators, students, and retirees.

[edit] Web site

The society’s web site features digital library resources including the online Futurist Bookshelf—brief summaries of new and noteworthy books, reviews, and links to order—and web forums on a variety of areas of interest to members. Also included are links to a range of resources such as future-centered blogs, educational programs and related organizations.

[edit] Publications

The World Future Society publishes numerous books, including Futuring: The Exploration of the Future (Oct. 2005), written by society founder Edward Cornish, as well as several print and electronic journals, including:

  • The Futurist, a full-color bimonthly popular magazine that reports on a wide range of topical trends and areas of interest. Among the thinkers and experts who have contributed to THE FUTURIST in the past year are: MIT architecture scholar William G. Mitchell and Joel Garreau on urban planning; Ray Kurzweil, John Smart, and J. Storrs Hall on the Singularity; Daniel Barnett of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on flu pandemic; Andrew Bacevich and Center for Strategic International Studies senior fellow Edward N. Luttwak on U.S. defense posture; Pulitzer Prize nominee James Martin on the existential challenges of the twenty-first century; NRDC vehicles campaign director Deron Lovaas and Wesleyan economist Gary Yohe on energy independence; New Atlantis editor Christine Rosen and New York Times Company futurist-in-residence Michael Rogers on media futures; U.S. Comptroller General David M. Walker on U.S. fiscal policy; and former CIA director Robert James Woolsey Jr. on biofuels among many others;
  • Future Survey, a monthly publication which alerts readers to the most important futures-relevant literature across a wide range of fields, from global policy to environmental technology. Concise and readable abstracts of recent books, articles, and reports are arranged in topical clusters that enable you to appreciate connections, subtle differences, and clashing opinions;
  • Futures Research Quarterly, a scholarly, refereed journal published four times per year which covers a wide range of subjects from marketing trends to aerospace and from futures methodology to global economics;
  • Futurist Update, a monthly electronic newsletter with topical items of interest to the futures community;
  • Outlook, an annual report offering members selected forecasts that can help them anticipate events of the future;
  • Learning Tomorrow, a quarterly electronic newsletter with articles of on a wide range of education or training subjects written by WFS members and education professionals around the world.
  • Future Times, a quarterly Web journal about the World Future Society and its activities plus a column on new technologies written by WFS President Timothy C. Mack.

[edit] External links