Wikibon Community To-Dos
- Join the Storage Market "prediction market" community (http://www.storagemarkets.com). It’s fun and it’s the best way to collaboratively generate data on future storage industry events.
- When registering, use the referral code M999SN to bypass a few screening steps.
Future Perfect Peer Incite Research Meetings
Decision making usually requires decision makers to make certain assumptions about future events. For example, "the past is prologue" is a common technique for assessing the future. Sometimes this technique works great, such as when predicting whether or not the sun will rise in the morning or set at night. Sometimes it doesn’t, such as when predicting whether or not the winner of the Kentucky Derby will win the Preakness.
Peer Incite research meetings devoted to trends will employ a "future perfect" research technique to develop the best, most actionable insight available. We borrow the term "future perfect" from our high school English teachers, who tried to teach us that the future perfect verb tense should be used to describe an event that will occur prior to a specific moment; for example "You will have completed your five-page essay on the trials of Hester Prynne as a metaphor for the struggle for women’s rights by the time you attend your first computer science class in college."
Essentially, instead of discussing "What will happen," Future Perfect Peer Incite research meetings will assume that an event has transpired at some moment in the future and "look back" to discuss, "What happened?"
We’ll employ a two-step collaborative process to conduct Future Perfect Peer Incite research meetings.
First, we’ll employ a prediction market to aggregate community insight into when an event will occur. Wikibon is working closely with the finest prediction market devoted to the storage community, Storage Markets (http://www.storagemarkets.com), to collaboratively generate data on the future.
Second, taking the Storage Market prediction as given, we will use the Future Perfect Peer Incite research meeting to answer the question, "How did we get here?"
Answers to this question will then be summarized and presented as the essential assumptions or goals that decision makers should adopt to achieve critical objectives.
Here’s an example of how the process will work. Let’s say that we want to help storage managers plan for the availability of a particular storage standard. First, Storage Markets will run a prediction market on when the standard in question will be available. Collaboratively, the Storage Market community chooses a year by buying and selling a "stock" indicating their answer. Perhaps the stock "2011" yields the best return. Second, when we meet for the Future Perfect Peer Incite research meeting we’ll pretend that it’s 2011, the standard in question is available, and that we can look back and identify the key events that made it all possible.
That’s it. So
- join the Storage Markets community. Don’t forget to use the referral code M999SN to bypass a few screening steps
- trade predictions
- attend Wikibon’s Peer Incite research meetings
- express opinions
- collaboratively generate the best IT insight anywhere.