Future Tense – Production Notes

Future Tense Ideas

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

It’s been a while since we mentioned some of the program ideas and issues we’re working on. Sorry. We’ve been a bit slack on that front!

So to begin here’s a definite list of some of the things we’ve got coming up.

• You might remember a fun conversation we did in July on the idea of the paperless office. That conversation was part of an occasional series this year called ‘getting it wrong’. For our next instalment we thought it might be fun to do something on all the hype and hysteria surrounding the Y2K bug. That discussion will go to air in October.
• We’ve seen the phenomenal growth of sites like Facebook and Twitter in the last few years. But have you heard of location based social networking services? Well, we’ll be looking at this new trend in an upcoming program.
• One of the fun things about making FT is that we get to talk to all sorts of people around the world working on interesting projects and ideas. A good example is an interview we did with Scott Brusaw who’s working on developing solar roadways. Yes, solar roadways! Don O’Brien got in touch with us on Twitter and suggested this idea. Thanks Don!
• One of the themes we’ve touched on over the last 12 months has been the use of technology in the developing world. We’ll be looking at that topic again when we focus on two really interesting initiatives. One is called Ushahidi - which is a crowdsourcing crisis information service. The other project is called Questionbox – which provides easy access to information.

So that’s just a few of the stories coming up. Here’s a brief list of a few other things we’ve started to work on!

• Food futures. We’re keen to look at some of the bigger questions in relation to things like food production, food security and urbanisation. We’ve started to make some calls but if you’ve got any ideas or issues you’d like us to cover then get in touch!
• China. We’ve been thinking for a while about doing something on the growth of China. This Atlantic Monthly article is one of the things that caught our eye. Not sure quite what we’ll be doing yet. Needs a bit more thought.
• Geo-politics and the future of the world. Big topics we know! But when we were talking about a program idea on China we wondered whether we could possibly make a second program looking at the future of some of the emerging powers like India and Brazil. No idea how that would work at the moment!
• Oceans. We’ve covered a few stories about different aspects of the oceans. But one thing we haven’t really looked at is the idea of ocean governance and whether that may change in the future. We’ve made contact with a few people but this is still a bit of an idea at this stage.

So that’s what we’re up to at the moment. If you’ve got any ideas, suggestions or feedback then feel free to leave a comment or get in touch with us on Twitter or via our webpage.

More soon!

Antony and Andrew.

Image from Cayusa under this Creative Commons License.

Tags: Future Tense, Ideas, Program information
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