Janna Anderson, assistant professor in the School of Communications, made contributions to two recent international foresight reports: The State of the Future 2007, published by the Millennium Project of the World Federation of UN Associations; and The Metaverse Roadmap Overview.
The Millennium Project of WFUNA (http://www.millennium-project.org/) is a global participatory futures research think tank of futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs and universities. It collects and assesses judgments from its several hundred participants to produce the annual “State of the Future” and “Futures Research Methodology” series, and special studies such as the State of the Future Index, Lessons of History and a 700+ annotated scenarios bibliography. Anderson is a contributing member of this volunteer think tank. The 2007 State of the Future executive summary is available at: http://www.millennium-project.org/millennium/sof2007.html
The Metaverse Roadmap (http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/) is the first public 10-year forecast and visioning survey of 3D Web technologies, applications, markets and potential social impacts. Areas of exploration include the convergence of Web applications with networked computer games and virtual worlds, digital mapping and artificial life, and the underlying trends in hardware, software, connectivity, business innovation and social adoption that will drive the transformation of the World Wide Web in the coming decade. An array of 3D web enhancements are emerging, visual extensions to the participatory web technologies now sweeping the online world. Social search, the archiving and sharing of online and real-world activities, ideas and experiences, is coming of age and going visual. Anderson was a participant in the Metaverse Summit, the Metaverse Survey and the follow-up inputs from which the Metaverse Roadmap report was built. The homepage for the initiative displays a prominent link to Elon’s Imagining the Internet site (http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org), where there are interviews with most of the key contributors http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/metaverse/ to the content of the report.