Sam Rose is with Forward Foundation
About the Forward Foundation
Forward Foundation is a Foresight/Futures studies not for profit research and development group. Our members in the past have worked in the past with http://www.iftf.org/, MacArthur Foundation, Stanford University, MIT Press, MITE, USDA, and hundreds of small groups and networks across the globe.
We produce research and forecasting like most "futures studies think tanks", but we also produce open source software and code, open source hardware and designs, and open licensed education materials. Examples include http://code.google.com/p/flows-dev/ http://web.archive.org/web/20181225004922/http://flows.panarchy.com//
http://socialmediaclassroom.com and some of us have worked on http://web.archive.org/web/20200102101202/http://cooperationcommons.com/ with http://iftf.org Our organizational development skills include:
Helping groups on all scales adopt and successfully use network-based-ecology approaches. Here's a recent presentation that we put together (which will also be published as a paper soon): http://www.slideshare.net/paulbhartzog/flows-2009-uk-media-ecologies
Our technical skills include:
Archives management, Complex Systems modeling and agent based modeling, CAD/CAM/F-CSG/Vector design, distrubuted systems architecture, authoring of open standards, and consulting on their usage and deployment. We've developed software in PHP, Python, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, and are even now developing a networked based programming language that is powered by http://web.archive.org/web/20181225004922/http://flows.panarchy.com/ We've also developed Arduino/Wiring hardware-based solutions.
Our Wealth Generating Ecology building skills and experience includes:
Working with meta and alternative currencies, local economy and social enterprise development, network-based project management, collaborative food, energy, creative output and physical object production, envrionmental scanning for network collaboration ecologies, and more.
There is now a long tail of needs in all systems. Many people are smaller scales, with smaller budgets are asking for unique and local versions of what larger open source and open standards-based projects have become.
Our production is based on the assumption that in addition to creating a tool or set of tools, that there also be a standard and portable way to share these open source Digital media education objects. Then they are usable in multiple tools, potentially.
Our design philosophy is to share not just the rendered output of the education package, but also the standard model that was used to produce the output. We believe that it is important to design for interoperability first, then to address what works best for you.