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Creating Everstate

Everstate is an imaginary state in our contemporary world of the beginning of the 21st century, created to identify and imagine various futures. It will be used to represent all states and each state. Everstate is thus an ideal-type state. It is also a shorthand for the model that was constructed to represent the dynamics …

Creating Evertime

Time in strategic foresight and warning is a crucial problem, as underlined in “Time in Strategic Foresight and Risk Management” and pointed out in “Everstate’s characteristics“. We shall still need much effort and research before to obtain detailed, proper and actionable timelines – and this without even considering timeliness. For the Chronicles of Everstate, we …

Everstate’s characteristics

The initial variables chosen to start building our scenario are the five most important variables of our model, according to Eigenvector centrality, as explained in the article “Revisiting influence analysis”. We shall now choose values for each criterion. Consistency is then checked, but only for the variables that are linked. As we aim at finding …

Everstate: Setting the stage (I)

Everstate is an ideal-type for our very real countries created to foresee the future of the modern nation-state. In the case of this specific scenario-building, we are setting the stage for Everstate, by attributing values to key influencing variable to be able to develop the scenarios. The explanations regarding the methodology used to develop the narrative is explained in …

The Chronicles of Everstate: the Actors

The Everstatans: the citizens (including companies), the people, the Nation Everstate’s central governing bodies or political authorities: the government, Parliament, the national representatives, the civil servants constituting the formal and rational modern bureaucracy. Everstate’s regional and local governing bodies: elected representatives at town, department (or county) and region level. Everstate’s political parties: Two major parties (loosely associated with social democrats on the one hand and conservative on the other). Other parties are insignificant in terms of national representation. International Special fund for Sustainable Innovation and Green Energy (ISSIGE) [Scenario 2 – Panglossy]: A special fund into which the new Everstatan government decides that Everstate must participate. This fund will help polities harnessing the ecological evolution and the increasing complexity of resources, …

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A Beautiful Timeline Visualisation: TimelineJS by VéritéCo

Last week, as I was looking for good websites and twitter users to follow the students’ movement in Quebec, its support by and links to the other worldwide opposition movements, and to try to assess how it could evolve, I found this really useful, informative and beautiful website displaying a timeline of the events done by Xavier K. Richard, @xkr. Today, I found that this timeline, or rather the incredible tool to make such a timeline, TimelineJS, created by VéritéCo, is a free web-based application. I could not resist the temptation to try it, continuing on the series of timelines created for “the Tragic Events that strike Everstate.” It is truly very easy to use (just use the Google spreadsheet …

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2213 – 2218 EVT – Tragic events

Tragic events strike Everstate. We witness tornadoes and drought, war in the Middle East and even a major industrial accident, while a new episode of financial crisis starts. These are instances of the various conditions presiding to Everstate’s destiny, considering what has been done, or not, globally, regionally and within Everstate.

The same set of events should be used to stress test each scenario. The logic of the scenario will however comes first, assuming it impacts the plausibility of the event. In that case, ….

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Featured Images, Symbols & Foresight Product: the Example of The Chronicles of Everstate

(updated 17 April 2012) When an image is featured and is meant to represent the totality of a foresight or anticipatory product, or a large section of it, it must capture the gist of the product. Symbols and symbolism are then crucial to transmit messages. This importance of symbols should anyway be considered for any use of image (as well as when developing a scenario narrative, for example when choosing names). This will be exemplified here with the Chronicles of Everstate. The image aims at capturing symbolically the features of the contemporary (early 21st century) modern nation-state: It, of course, is an heir to Hobbes Leviathan. However, compared with the original image, the head of the sovereign is not displayed …

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Navigating the Chronicles of Everstate

The featured image for this post is a snapshot of a map done with Pearltrees. This page is about presenting ways to follow and access the series of posts constituting The Chronicles of Everstate, beyond the usual linear menus or the detailed outline in the website footer. This idea, mapping the very posts of The Chronicles of Everstate, is a direct result of the interactive quality of this foresight experiment. One faithful reader, indeed, underlined that, as the number of posts increased, reading and understanding was becoming more complex, notably for newcomers. He suggested that a map would be very helpful to allow users and readers to navigate among posts. We then discussed various ways to implement this idea. Here are …

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Everstate: Setting the stage (2)

Summary of our scenario so far: Everstate is an ideal-type for our very real countries created to foresee the future of the modern nation-state. In the case of this specific scenario-building, we are setting the stage for Everstate, by attributing values to key influencing variable to be able to develop the scenarios.

As previously set, Everstate is thus a middle-range power located on the Eurasian land mass and part of the international liberal order. It is ruled under a democratic… Read More

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