Sirkka Heinonen, Chair of the Helsinki Node of the Millennium Project and Mikko Dufva, President of the Finnish Society for Futures Studies brought me to Finland hosted by SITRA  (Finland’s innovation funding agency) and Finland’s Futures Research Center. Sirkka put together a great program beginning with a talk and workshop on weak signals at SITRA lead by Mikko (who’s day job in foresight for SITRA) followed by a meeting of the Helsinki Node and mini training on GFIS (Global Futures Intelligence System). That evening Sirkka and I joined Markku Wilenius (a leading futurist of Finland and involved in the creation of the Helsinki MP) and his colleague to explore The Millennium Project collaboration on a new futures initiative (about which later as it develops).  The next day – after saying hello to Sohail Inayatullah who was running a workshop in Helsinki – we had lunch with staff and a new Member of the Committee for the Future of the Finnish Parliament. We discussed a broad range of topics including creating alternative cash flow projections for universal basic income and information warfare models to predict and prevent impacts of actions.

Then on to the Finnish Future Research Center’s two-day conference in Tampere to talk about the Future Self-Actualization Economy and a workshop with Sirkka on peer-to-peer, renewable energy, and sustainability for the Finland Futures Academy (FFA) with summer school. Prior to the conference the Foresight European Network held a meeting lead by Cornelia Daheim results will be available at: http://www.feneu.org/. While at the conference I got to catch up with Erik Øverland (President of the World Federation of Futures Studies), Riel Miller (Foresight UNESCO), and others. Now back to Washington, DC to do my laundry and get ready to go to South Korea.