Azerbaijan Mini Trip Report

The Minister of Communications hosted Blaz Golob (South East European Node Chairman of The Millennium Project) and me to participate in BakuTel (leading telecom expo of the region) and the UN Internet Governance Forum in Baku.

Reyhan Huseynova, Chairwoman of the MP Azerbaijan Node and the Minister made it possible for us to brief talk with the President of Azerbaijan, who said he remembered my mini briefing on the Azerbaijan State of the Future Index (AZ-SOFI) last year and that he saw that the Millennium Project has expanded very well over the past year. Subsequently we met with senior government and university officials about: 1) organizing the first (and maybe annual) Baku Futures Forum; 2) an up-dated AZ-SOFI; 3) Collective Intelligence System to provide input the national futures planning; and 4) Peace Scenarios for the Caucus Region (similar to the Middle East Peace Scenarios we wrote several years ago. If the Baku Futures Forum goes forward (June 2013), we might hold the MP Planning Committee Meeting just before the Baku Futures Forum, as we did with conferences in Brazil and Belgium several years ago.

I gave a demonstration of the construction site for the Global Future Collective Intelligence S ystem www.themp.org at the Strategic Studies Center under the Office of the President and Blaz talked about eGovernmence. I also taught The Millennium Project’s tele-course on futures concepts, global challenges, and methods in person rather than on ooVoo video conferencing. This is the fourth year this one-year two-semester tele-video course has been offered at the Azerbaijan State Economic University. The first semester covers futures concepts plus the 15 Global Challenges , and the second semester covers futures research methods.

All the best,

Jerry