What’s New? – 29 September 2016

Groups: Members can now ‘add’ special interest, open Groups on the main Shaping Tomorrow site while ST clients can also create private groups in their customized sites. Open groups can be joined and closed groups require the approval of the group owner.

Groups also allow tagging, referral of forecasts and insights, report creation, sharing with other social media sites and forums for specialized discussions among members.

Snapshots: Snapshots provide an at-a-glance picture of a forecast's verbatim information extracted by Athena, our virtual assistant.

The more to the top right a forecast appears and the higher the Intensity the greater the effect on the world is likely to be. Conversely, the more to the lower left and lower Intensity the less likely the effect will be.

You can use Snapshots to flash different forecasts before a virtual or workshop audience and have them comment on their views of how these may affect society or your organization. Comments gathered can then be seen under the Forum button of the specific forecast and discussed by your audience to obtain a common position.

Snapshots can also be created in paper form using the Print button. These can be used in workshops as folded cards for manipulation on wall boards or tables to create mind-maps, decision trees, etc.

PESTLE: We have added a new sort-criteria under the Refine button, again at the suggestion of Adrian Taylor, which allows the selection of forecasts by Political, Economic, Social and Technological headings etc.

My Challenges: We are also grateful to Geoff McBride of STFC for the suggestion that some client challenges require secrecy and need to be kept private to a specific individual. This is now available for clients only.