Kickstarter

With over 600 million users and a valuation of over $70 billion, Facebook is the world's dominant social networking platform. What are the challenges a social media company of this size will face? What are the strategic moves it should make? How can Facebook users take advantage of the platform and its increasingly rich social graph?

These are the questions we are addressing with the Future of Facebook video series. Using the STEEP forecasting methodology, we’ll be viewing the challenges and opportunities for this company through the lenses of Society, Technology, Environment, Economics, and Politics. Each of these five categories will become a short focus video that fleshes out that topic area. The final video will be a big picture overview of the potential pathways for the evolution of Facebook.

Interviews are still underway, but here’s a look at who we’ve talked to so far: 

David Armano - SVP, Edelman Digital

Stowe Boyd - futurist, social technologies blogger

Jamais Cascio - ethical futurist, Senior Fellow of the IEET

Amber Case - co-founder Geoloqi

Suzanne Fischer - Curator of Technology, The Henry Ford

Garry Golden - energy and emerging markets futurist

Alex Howard - Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media

Kevin Kelly - author, What Technology Wants; founding editor, Wired Magazine

Brett King - author, BANK 2.0

Rita J King - Innovator-in-Residence IBM Analytics Virtual Center

David Kirkpatrick - author, The Facebook Effect

Valdis Krebs - founder, Orgnet; network analysis expert

Richard MacManus - founder, ReadWriteWeb

Om Malik - founder, Giga Omni Media

Eghosa Omoigui - Venture Capital & Private Equity

Howard Rheingold - author, Smart Mobs

Douglas Rushkoff - author, Program or Be Programmed

Doc Searls - author, Cluetrain Manifesto

David Siegel - author, Pull

John Smart - President, Accelerating Studies Foundation

Scott Smith - founder, Changeist

Nova Spivack - founder, Lucid Ventures

Sibley Verbeck - founder, The Electric Sheep Company

This project is being assembled according to a process we’re developing called Open Foresight, which aims to serve as an updated model for harvesting collective insight, generating scenarios, and creating strategic roadmaps into the future. By combining available data, opinions from the experts, and the conventional wisdom of the crowds, we’ll be able to analyze a topic from a wide range of perspectives and viewpoints. We’ll then distill that down into a series of animation-rich videos that summarize these insights. All of the content we collect will be made available via Creative Commons SA by-cc so that it can be reused, remixed, and built upon by others.

To launch the public arm of the project, we've posted the same 15 questions we asked all interviewees onto Quora. We'll be monitoring the topic for the most insightful and provocative answers you've got. The people with our favorite answers will be invited to participate in an interview with us for inclusion in one of the final videos. You can add your vision to "The Future of Facebook" topic page here: http://www.quora.com/The-Future-of-Facebook-Project

Your donation will help us cover editing, animation, and other critical production costs.

We hope this will be the first of many upcoming foresight projects that teach us to better harness our collective ability to understand complex issues in a way that’s open, collaborative, and fun!