If you've visited here before, you'll notice a change in the FutureMonitor site.  More than a thousand of you are registered, and we know many others from the Monitor Networks community have lurked regularly, so I want to be sure we tell you what's different, what's not, and why we've made a change.

FutureMonitor mission has been to "identify the trends that will matter most in two years, through the conversation of a global sensing network."  We called it a "Wisdom of Crowds experiment," hoping a broad population would sense, evolve, and select the clues to the near-term future.  What we learned from this attempt was that, while feedback for the concept was very enthusiastic, people have a high threshold before they will contribute, and that the energy required on our part to overcome this hurdle is considerable.  So we began looking for a model that would make it easier for us and easier for you.

The new version has the same mission--to identify the most important near-term trends. But we're bringing some new resources to bear. Since we began FutureMonitor, we at Monitor Networks have grown our Talent Network to critical mass. Members are leaders in business, science, and society whom we represent for speaking and other engagements. (See Monitor Talent)  While not exactly a crowd, this group represents a set of wise "over the horizon"  observers in many different fields. Now we have the opportunity to stand on their shoulders.  In this space, I'll be posting excerpts from their writings and other media to provide a collective view of what's important through their eyes. I'll be writing in blog format, partly to try to provide some continuity among these diverse contributors, and partly because this approach makes it easy for you to offer a quick comment--or more if you feel like it. I'll be writing in the same spirit.  (Also, don't expect a 4-posts-per-day blog--posting will be driven by the availability of good content. Also mood.)

We hope you'll find our contributors individually and collectively insightful enough to visit a few times each month. We'll be letting registered members know when there are new major postings (you can opt out, of course), or you can subscribe to the RSS feed. We hope that, because our input is more focused, and the effort needed to comment lower, we can broaden the community faster and ignite the evolution process. And we'll keep experimenting--as Clay Shirky pointed out in the Harvard Business Review's Breakthrough Ideas of 2007, the web affords the luxury of inexpensive trials.