by and Nick Balcom Raleigh (FEN President)

Foresight Europe Network meets in-person before Futures Conference 2024 in Turku, Finland – Foresight Europe Network held its Summer Meeting as a pre-event of Futures Conference 2024: Futures of Natural Resources at University of Turku, Finland on 12 June. The meeting was attended by 23 individuals from diverse geographical locations inside and outside Europe. Many attending individuals were new to FEN.

The meeting started with three presentations followed by group discussions about any topics of interest arising from them. The presentations covered a recently launched consortium project to develop the foresight community of Europe, public participation in parliamentary committees of the future, and the ongoing studies by the Millennium Project into futures of Artificial General Intelligence.
The session opened with a welcome message from FEN President Nick Balcom Raleigh (2023-2024) and an icebreaker (using Sitra’s Cards of Hope) led by FEN VP & Future President Lena Tünkers. Then, Dr. Radu Gheorghiu and Bianca Dragomir from Institutul de Prospectiva (Romania) presented about the Eye of Europe project and the futures4europe.eu platform.

Gheorghiu frames the task of Eye of Europe as building a social infrastructure for piecing together existing conversations in foresight and amplifying them to create synergies. He notes that foresight is not only about producing outputs, but also about the transformation of people. He believes greater impact can be achieved if we bring all who engage in foresight – practitioners, clients, domain experts – together as a community. For example, domain experts who have previously participated in foresight exercises should be able to both share and benefit from the community’s wealth of knowledge and capacities, so that all contributors engage in a virtuous circle of continuous learning and promotion of their work. Ultimately, Eye of Europe envisions a cohesive and influential European foresight community that contributes significantly, as a collective intelligence, to guiding policy decisions in R&I and beyond and the public discourse around futures. Further, Bianca Dragomir presented the planned offline activities of the project – mutual learning events, foresight workshops, futures literacy trainings, conferences – which will take place in the period until late 2026. She also showcased the diversity of foresight content already available on futures4europe.eu, the online home of the European foresight community, and encouraged FEN members to become platform members and share about their current work. By fall 2024, futures4europe.eu will undergo a major upgrade.

The next presentation was from Sofi Kurki, a senior researcher at VTT (Finland), about an academic article she published titled “Towards National Systems Level Foresight? Understanding the Role and Future Directions of Citizen Participation in the Production of Finnish National Foresight Reports.” (2021, Futures, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2021.102781). In Finland, each elected government is responsible for preparing a futures report on an issue of future concern and delivering it to the Committee for the Future in parliament. The committee is obligated to provide their response to the report. Together these two documents form the visionary basis for the next government program (a plan of action for the national government for its planned term regarding long-term issues). In her article, Kurki analyzed citizen participation in the three past cycles of this process for understanding what role citizen participation has played in the preparation of the reports, and if and how the citizen participation could contribute to building systemic foresight capabilities in Finland.

The final presentation was from the Deputy Director of the Millennium Project, Ibon Zugasti, who presented about the independent, internationally networked think tank’s ongoing study into futures of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) titled ‘Transition from Artificial Narrow to Artificial General Intelligence Governance’. This study finished its first phase that collected views of 55 AGI leaders from many countries in April 2021 and the Phase 1 report is currently available for purchase in English, Spanish and Chinese. In the second phase, a Real-time Delphi Study was conducted in which AGI experts assessed potential regulations, and the Phase 2 report will be available soon. Phase 3 aims to produce AGI governance scenarios through 2035. Zugasti is a founding member-leader of FEN and remarked on the network’s origins in the European Millennium Project Nodes Initiative (EuMPI) and the European Regional Foresight College.

The discussions covered various topics resonating with meeting attendees’ interests, ranging from the promotion and sustainment of a community such as Eye for Europe and the absence of Indigenous foresight practices in most professional discussions, to some of the younger participants expressing a sense of disconnection from the types of topics, methods and approaches in the conventional foresight scene.

Following the meeting, approximately a dozen attendees continued their conversations over dinner at Sergio’s, along the beautiful river Aura.

Next FEN Meeting: FEN Demo Hour on Dreams and Disruption Game, July 11, 2024.