Or perhaps I should say linking the rest of the world to what’s happening here in Northeast Ohio…

Jamais Cascio, one of the WorldChanging founders we’ve quoted here before has a great new piece on The Open Future about open source scenario planning. One brief example:

“Imagine a database of thousands of items all related to understanding how the future could turn out. This database would include narrow concerns and large-scale driving forces alike, would have links to relevant external materials, and would have space for the discussion of and elaboration on the entries. The items in the database would link to scenario documents showing how various forces and changes could combine to produce different possible outcomes. Best of all, the entire construction would be open access, free for the use.”

While we don’t track individual users here at TechFutures, we do know usage patterns from various parts of the country and the world. TechFutures already reaches people in China, Russia, Korea, Japan, Canada, Germany, Australia, Chile, the UK…and the list goes on. Within the United States, more people in California than Ohio visit TechFutures, and the number of people in Seattle who follow this site regularly is steadly increasing. Texas, D.C., Colorado, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia are a few of the other heavy hitters of the site in the US.

So I’m extremely intrigued by Jamais’s idea of an open source scenario database. We already know the scenarios we came up with here describe not only possible futures for our region and currently emerging worlds, but also a business cycle pattern that repeats itself over and over again, not only here but in just about every other market where innovation and creative destruction play a role in the development of the economy.

Read Jamais’s full essay for yourself here. And look for TechFutures to be a part of his concept for a “world of open source scenario planning”.