From Gunther Sonnenfeld & Nigel Cameron, Managing Directors of C-PET's New Policy Innovation Futures Platform

Gunther Sonnenfeld

 Nigel Cameron

See below for a list of C-PET Futures Platform advisers

Designing civil intelligence?

So the sequester grinds on, good men and women pursue the trench warfare at which Capitol Hill excels, and the future of the United States looks more precarious by the day.

Public and private policy in today's world has boiled down to the tepid commitment of belief systems that seem untethered to foundational wisdom and anchored to party alliances that often do very little for our long-term social, political or technological advancement. In short, as corporations, legislators, lobbyists and citizen activist groups, we are seeking quick solutions to highly complex problems that are predicated on borrowed time and borrowed capital.... And doing so from falsely appointed sides of the same coin.

We are here to change that.

A new day has emerged in which fresh forces such as social media, 'big data' and citizen journalism provide the gateways for a greater understanding of our world and its constituent geopolitical systems. It's no mystery why the likes of Occupy, Wikileaks and the Arab Spring have put institutions on their heels: We can no longer make assumptions about our political discourse, nor can we ignore the socio-economic contexts in which these events operate.

If we look back in history at events such as the Madoff ponzi and Lehman's collapse, or even the Spanish Inquisition and the Monte di Pieta, it becomes abundantly clear that all of these institutional failings and examples of socio-political unrest could have been avoided. And not by virtue of strong-arming power structures (we know what happens there...), but rather, in aligning them through insight, intelligence, foresight and opportunity. By shifting the questions. By re-weighting, re-framing. By bringing new players to new tables, and old players under new rules of engagement.

Now consider this.

What if a new, mutually profitable and ethically fortified relationship could be forged between corporations, government entities, NGOs, citizen activist groups? What if these groups were in fact the new stakeholders? What if we could provide a process to get them not only talking, but creating solutions, together, that could be actioned for the near and long term? What if these comprised the markets of today and tomorrow?

We call it 'designing civil intelligence.' Here's what it looks like:

There are several pillars for civil intelligence design:

- The establishment, understanding and socialization of context; in other words, it is a process that asks better, deeper first questions such as what is the true nature of a problem set? Who are the agents and actors? What does the historical narrative really tell us? What scenarios might we imagine? What are the benefits if we change the questions?

- The development of relevant content through which to take action; this can come in the form of new storytelling, new advocacy groups, new policy movements, new coalitions, even new legislation, or all.

- Leveraging those actions to build a recursive, regenerative intelligence that stretches across domains, departments, educational centers and industries. Think of a giant feedback loop, replete with critical quantitative and qualitative information.

- The rapid prototyping of solutions with key stakeholders as actual products, plans and/or services such that new economic, social reform and technological models can be introduced into the fold with relative speed and seamless integration.

- Providing a viable platform to monitor changes, establish benchmarks and adapt to rapid shifts in the marketplace.

- Catapulting our conventional policy notions such as 'lobby,' 'censure' and 'filibuster' into redefinition or reinvention such that we transform our governance culture from perennial stasis into continuous innovation.

Join us in this effort to build a stable, democratic and prosperous future. We look forward to collaborating with you.

Your responses will be read with appreciation; and we shall respond.

Yours truly,

Nigel & Gunther

Nigel Cameron

Gunther Sonnenfeld

C-PET Futures Platform

Managing Directors: Gunther Sonnenfeld and Nigel Cameron

- unique global network of domain experts & emerging disciplinarians. 

Advisers

Sarah Miller Caldicott

Daniel Caprio

Sasha Grujicic

Nagy Hanna

Stu Heilsberg

Jennie Hunter-Cevera

Stephen Jordan

Robert McCreight

Chantal Payette

Jennifer Sertl

Naomi Stanford

GUNTHER SONNENFELD

Gunther Sonnenfeld, Managing Director, is a globally recognized thought leader in the areas of social technology and business innovation, having run labs in a variety of international markets that focus on the rapid development of prototypes, products and growth plans to solve complex problems. He has co-developed over a dozen proprietary platforms in the search, social media, business intelligence, digital content and analytics domains, and has won several awards for his innovation work, including a Forrester Groundswell Award in 2010.

As a Venture Partner at K5, a startup accelerator based in Southern California, Gunther advises a number of disruptive startups, along with his strategic efforts for the Fortune 1000. He speaks frequently around the world on the topics of digital convergence and emerging markets, and has keynoted alongside of visionaries such as Sir Richard Branson, Guy Kawasaki, Arianna Huffington and Jonathan Harris. He is currently co-writing a book entitled The Big Pivot, a blueprint for companies looking to build sustainable customer relationships and sustainable markets within this shifting media and technology landscape. 

NIGEL CAMERON

Nigel Cameron, Managing Director, is a strategic adviser focused on innovation and change. He leads the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET) in Washington, DC.

In 2010-11 Nigel Cameron addressed corporate audiences on all five inhabited continents, including the biennial innovation festival hosted by Australian finance giant AMP; Nanomedicine Beijing; the "world's leading conference on content marketing" Summit in London; and WorkTech New York City. Other recent speaking invitations have included the UN prepcon for Rio+20, Planet under Pressure; and the 2012 European Identity and Cloud Conference. His speaking is managed by ATG│Chartwell. US: ellis@americantalentgroup.com, Global: alexh@chartwellpartners.co.uk.

In the early 2000s, he was invited to participate in Project Horizon, the U.S. State Department multi-year scenario-based strategic planning process. Three times he has been executive-in-residence at UBS Wolfsberg (Switzerland). He has appeared on network media in several countries, including in the U.S. ABC Nightline and PBS Frontline; and in the UK the BBC flagship shows Newsnight and Breakfast with Frost. He has also served on U.S delegations to the United Nations and is currently a Commissioner of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO.

Books include Nanoscale (Wiley); Innovation President (Kindle e-book); and (forthcoming) Living with Exponential Change: A Guide for Business, Government, and the Rest of Us. 

SARAH MILLER CALDICOTT

Innovate Like Edison: The Five Step System for Breakthrough Business Success. An award-winning speaker and innovation process expert, Sarah works with organizations that want to bring innovative thinking to their everyday business practices so they can accelerate growth and create relevance. Themes from Sarah's TEDx speech were recently captured in her ebook, Inventing the Future: What Would Thomas Edison Be Doing Today?  Sarah has also served as past Chairperson of the Edison Awards.

Senor Fellow, C-PET

DANIEL CAPRIO

Dan Caprio brings over 25 years of experience on legal and policy issues involving the convergence of internet, telecommunications, and technology. He has substantial knowledge and experience in the areas of privacy, cyber security, and the Internet of Things, a term used when everyday objects are connected to the Internet. Mr. Caprio works with clients to define and capitalize on public policy strategies in the United States and Europe.

From 2004 to 2006, he served as Chief Privacy Officer and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy at the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) where he advised the Secretary of Commerce and the White House on technology policy and privacy protection. While at the DoC, he oversaw activities related to the development and implementation of federal privacy laws, policies, and practices. In 2011, he was appointed as a trade policy advisor to the Secretary of Commerce and United States Trade Representative.  From 2007 through 2011, Mr. Caprio advised the Secretary of Homeland Security on Data Privacy matters. In 2010, Mr. Caprio was appointed as a transatlantic subject matter expert to advise the European Commission on the Internet of Things. 

Prior to his tenure at the DoC, he served as Chief of Staff to Commissioner Orson Swindle at the Federal Trade Commission. In 2002, he was appointed to represent the United States in revising the OECD guidelines on information systems and networks. Mr. Caprio holds an active security clearance for classified matters

Senior Fellow, C-PET

SASHA GRUJICIC

Sasha Grujicic is a media, marketing and technology executive at Aegis Media working globally with Fortune 500 companies (GM, P&G, Pfizer, adidas, Diageo, Citibank, Disney, Target) to understand media, technology, policy and their connection to their businesses. Helping to manage billion-dollar global budgets Sasha has worked the world over to progressively develop programs, products and services that culturally, ideologically, ethically and morally suit a given environment. Sasha is also a recent graduate of Singularity University, the �lite, global joint-venture program founded by Google, NASA and Ray Kurzweil, dedicated to the understanding of accelerating technologies and their impacts on humanity. Sasha actively consults with a variety of emerging companies dedicated to the adoption of accelerating technologies. 

Sasha is a passionate writer, speaker and technology evangelist contributing to publications like Marketing, Strategy, Infopresse and Campaign, lecturing at the Ontario College of Art and Design, the IAB, the World Future Society, Miami Ad School and the University of Ottawa and is co-authoring an upcoming book titled The Big Pivot. Sasha also serves as the editor of THINK LAB, a an entity within the Lab Media Group that co-develops editorial content with luminaries like Professor Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman. 

NAGY HANNA

Nagy Hanna is an internationally recognized development strategist with extensive experience in advising developing countries and aid agencies on designing and implementing of strategies to leverage information and communication technology in support of national, sectoral and corporate strategies. He led the World Bank's practice in applying ICT for development, as the Bank's first senior advisor on e-Development, and the chair of the worldwide community of practice on e-Development with over 4000 members. Hanna is an innovator, communicator, change agent, executive coach, and global thought leader. He has been responsible for developing national ICT strategies, strategic management processes, capacity building programs, evaluation and learning systems, and new lending and advisory services for the World Bank and client countries. He has lectured and published extensively on e-Development, strategic planning, change management, executive education and institutional development. After retiring from the World Bank, he currently serves as the Co-Director and Senior Fellow at the e-Leadership Academy of University of Maryland in USA, as well as being a Senior International Development Strategy Consultant for the National e-Strategy and Corporate Strategy in the United States of America.

Senior Fellow, C-PET

STU HEILSBERG

Stu Heilsberg is a seasoned Business Development and Product Management executive, with experience in development and expansion of mobile products and services in a variety of markets in the United States, Europe and Asia.  He has created strategies for and developed businesses in mobile commerce, indoor & outdoor LBS, mobile image recognition & search, mobile health, and many mobile devices.  He has developed and managed relationships with companies of all sizes, including Samsung, LG, Cisco, Wells Fargo, Verizon, Walmart, Target, Ceridian, Foxconn, Pfizer, HP, Bank of America, and more. 

With an undergraduate degree from MIT and an MBA from The Kellogg Graduate School of management, he has been positioned throughout his career to bridge the gap between technology and end users.  He has done this in creating several businesses at Qualcomm, as well as Motorola, where he launched the StarTAC phone, and Intuit, where he managed the TurboTax product line.  Having built a consulting practice, Stu serves companies to engage across their targeted ecosystems and ensure that what they build is truly valuable to the ecosystem, profitable, and leverages key trends.  He has a relentless focus on revenue development and tangible sales milestones.  Stu speaks at many higher education institutions, as well as mentors students at the undergraduate and graduate level on his approach to ecosystem engagement.  This has led to engagements with Stanford University, as well as his authoring a book titled The Answers Are Outside The Building.

JENNIE HUNTER-CEVERA

Dr. Jennie C. Hunter-Cevera served as Executive Vice President of Discovery and Analytical Sciences, Government Affairs & Corporate Development, Public Relations and Corporate Communications at RTI International in Durham, NC. From 1999 to July 2009, Dr. Hunter-Cevera served as the President of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. Prior to this, she was the Director of the Center for Environmental Biotechnology at the E. O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which was a collaborative effort between the Lab and the University of California at Berkeley. Earlier, she was co-founder of two companies (The Biotic Network and Blue Sky Research) that did contract work for large pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and also consulted for five years in a variety of biotechnology fields.

For 10 years Dr. Hunter-Cevera was employed at Cetus Corporation and served as the Director of Fermentation, Research and Development and before that at E. R. Squibb and Sons as a Research Scientist. Dr. Hunter-Cevera has served as President of the Society of Industrial Microbiology (SIM), the United States Federation of Culture Collections (USFCC) and the International Marine Biotechnology Association. She served as Senior Editor for the Journal of Industrial Microbiology for ten years. Dr. Hunter-Cevera also served as a member on former USDA Secretary Glickman's Genetic Resources Advisory Board and President Clinton's State Department Council on Genetically Modified Foods. Dr. Hunter-Cevera also served as the United States representative to the OECD on Biological Resource Centers.

Dr. Hunter-Cevera holds several patents in natural products and enzymes, has written many scientific publications in the area of microbial ecology and screening, and has been an invited speaker at scientific meetings throughout the world. She chaired the NAS committee on the DOE's GTL program on biofuels and is currently chairing a standing committee and a planning committee on biodefense to examine the production of therapeutics and vaccines for the DoD.

Senior Fellow, C-PET

STEPHEN JORDAN

Co-founder and Senior Partner of IO Sustainability. In 2000, Stephen founded and served for 12 years as executive director of the Business Civic Leadership Center, a not-for-profit 501(c)-3 affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce focused on corporate social responsibility and public-private partnerships. He is the author, co-author, or editor of numerous publications on corporate responsibility, business ethics, and global development, including "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: A Brief History of Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Social Responsibility" and the "Role of Business" series of reports on corporate contributions to various social and environmental issues. Before founding BCLC, Stephen served as executive director of the Association of American Chambers of Commerce in Latin America. Previously, he worked in the publishing industry and as a legislative assistant in the U.S. Senate. 

Stephen serves on the U.S. Commission for UNESCO, the Board of Advisors of the Corporate Responsibility Officers Association, and is a fellow of the Caux Roundtable.   Stephen holds an MBA from Georgetown University and an MA in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia.

Senior Fellow, C-PET

ROBERT MCCREIGHT

He has over 35 years experience in the State Department working on global security, arms control, intelligence operations, biowarfare, nuclear weaponry, counter-terrorism, emergency humanitarian missions and POLMIL affairs with accomplishments in treaty verification, negotiations, foreign affairs analysis, humanitarian assistance deployments and program management. He has completed special projects for the National Security Council and the White House involving counter-terrorism and homeland security. Dr. McCreight's work includes development of Homeland Security Directives for the White House, collaborative terrorism research involving Russian Special Forces, and campaign planning for major disasters and humanitarian crises. During his professional career he worked on major humanitarian crises such as Somalia and Bosnia as well as major natural disasters including the Armenian and Turkish earthquakes. He also served 27 years concurrently in the US military working in intelligence, PSYOPS, civil affairs and logistics and holds a doctorate from George Mason University with an M.A. from George Washington University and a baccalaureate from West Chester University. McCreight has published articles on homeland security and national defense subjects and teaches as an adjunct professor in the graduate programs of Georgetown and George Washington Universities.

Senior Fellow, C-PET

CHANTAL PAYETTE

A digital media pioneer; Chantal Payette has proven unique in her field for seamlessly bridging the worlds of entertainment, technology, music, news, branding and content development. Payette's strong commitment to integration, leadership and the bottom line has made her one of the foremost digital landscapers in North America over the last 17 years. Past and current clients include: AOL, CBS, CanWest, ESPN, MIT, Boston Consulting, DTG, RBC, Disney's Family Channel, CTVGlobeMedia, Alliance Atlantis, MTV, MySpace, the Discovery Channel and ImpreMedia. Also an experienced journalist and broadcaster, Payette's contributions to The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star, as well as a regular on-air technology correspondent for The Discovery Channel have exclusively qualified her to evaluate both sides of the media divide. A frequent guest and panelist on television and radio, Payette's insights into the realities of digital culture have seen her chairing panels in the US, Europe and Asia and guest lecturing at the University of British Columbia. Named one of Chatelaine Magazine's "Digital Women of the Year," Payette has been profiled in Report on Business Magazine, MONEYSENSE, FLARE, The National Post, The Ottawa Citizen and Canadian Business.

JENNIFER SERTL

Founder and president of Agility3, an organizational effectiveness company which primarily focuses upon the optimization of customer value by aligning corporate objectives with the individuals responsible for delivering results, Jennifer had successfully run three separate C-level 'think tanks' between 2002-2007.  Over the past 12 years her expertise and insights have focused paradigm shifts in executive leadership, employee engagement and shareholder responsibility in both privately held and publicly traded corporations in the transportation, telecommunications and health care industries, including: Blue Cross Blue Shield, Frontier Communications, Genesee and Wyoming Inc., Optimax Systems Inc., Zotos International, Global Crossings, Landsman Development Company, Tabtronics, and nearly thirty other businesses. In supporting the growth strategies of small companies Jennifer has established an international peer-to-peer learning environment contributing to economic development in several countries.

Jennifer runs a business simulation strategy game called Interplay that facilitates awareness and personal accountability focused upon quantifying intangible assets and human capital.

Jennifer's book Strategy, Leadership and the Soul was released in Q2 2010 and is available on Amazon.com.

Senior Adviser, C-PET

NAOMI STANFORD

Naomi Stanford is a consultant, teacher, and author. Her work as a consultant is in organization design and development in all its manifestations. She is the author of four books: Organization Design, the Collaborative Approach; The Economist Guide to Organisation Design; Organisation Culture: Getting it Right (also an Economist publication); Organizational Health. Before leaving the UK to live in the US she was a corporate employee of large multinational companies, including British Airways, Marks & Spencer, and Xerox. Since moving to the US she has been consulting to a range of organizations in the government, non-profit and private sectors. Additionally, she supervises doctoral students in the School of Business and Technology at Capella University.

Project and clients have included: Designing the strategy and leading the change management activity of a complex corporate move,

General Services Administration; Planning and facilitating the merger of two business units, Gap Inc.; Leading an organization design implementation to bridge two organizational divisions, Royal Dutch Shell/Johnson Controls; Developing and running consulting skills, organization development, and organization design programs in China

HR Excellence Center; organization design programs for American Airlines, Google, UK Borders Authority, Diebold, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, HR Society, HR Excellence Center, Association of Professional Design Firms, Akzo Nobel, United States Postal Service.

Senior Fellow, C-PET

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Internet of Things Summit

I am delighted to invite you to the Washington, DC summit on the Internet of Things, on October 1-2, at the National Press Club. FTC chair Edith Ramirez is the latest keynote speaker to confirm. 

As you may know, C-PET hosted an invitational DC conference on the Internet of Things a year or two back in partnership with McKenna Long and Aldridge. We are very pleased to serve as knowledge partner in this high-level event with Forum Global, and I hope I may look forward to seeing you there. I am delighted that several of our distinguished C-PET colleagues are participating, including Senior Fellows Michael Nelson and Daniel Caprio.

See below for more details, and check the special conference website. The draft schedule is here. To discuss sponsorship and other opportunities, contact Tom Chinnock.

On another matter: in case you missed it, scroll down for my remarks on UNESCO as the global futures agency given at a lunch hosted recently by the U.S. Ambassador to UNESCO in Paris.

 Best,

Nigel Cameron

President and CEO, C-PET

I was recently in Paris where the United States ambassador to UNESCO, David Killion, kindly invited me to address a luncheon at which most of the guests were senior officials of UNESCO. I've expanded my observations and am sharing with the C-PET list since they encapsulate themes we have often discussed, such as the global framing of core questions raised by the development of emerging technologies, and the fundamental fact of exponential change. As you may know, the United States ceased to fund UNESCO in 2011 (though at present we retain our membership) in response to the admission of Palestine. 

I have always been a fan of UNESCO, since for all the frustrations we find in dealing with intergovernmental organizations its vision, founded in a remarkable effort to interconnect the global community on non-political questions in the aftermath of the Second World War, seems to me designed very specifically for the 21st-century.

The visionary individuals whose initiative led to the founding of the organization displayed a prescience that at the time would have made little sense. They were however aware of the fundamental significance of culture, in the broad sense, in setting the stage for the global order - at a time when that order had collapsed at the initiative (as we must acknowledge) of the world's, or at least the West's, leading cultural power. In those famous words from the UNESCO charter, "since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed." (An aside: the adoption of British English by the UN system is itself a comment on how far we find ourselves in 2013 from the global order of the 1940s.)

For one thing, UNESCO's focus spans the disciplines. In an age of deep disciplinary specialization, one of the characteristics of the 20th century and a core reason for its success - in Fordist approaches to management as well as the blossoming of "modern science" - UNESCO brings together education, science, and culture; which essentially cover all of our disciplines. And which, as I wrote in a piece about an earlier visit to UNESCO some years ago, if it were put together today would also include the business community. UNEBSCO was the name I conjured up. (Easy to Google; no one else has ever used the word.) Point is: UNESCO was designed in the mid-20th century to span the sciences natural and social, the humanities, their application in education, broader culture, and communication; the whole shebang of the efforts of the human mind. In one sense this harks back to the 18th century, where knowledge was so much more limited that intellectual leadership could come from individuals whom we would now see as generalists. Thomas Malthus, economist and demographer, was one. Thomas Bayes, whose innovative approach to statistics is now on everyone's tongue, was another. Yet by trade they were both clergymen (Anglican and Presbyterian, respectively).

My point is that we have moved from pre-specialism through specialism and sub-specialism into an emerging context in which data is indefinite in quantity. Whereas this might seem like the time to hunker down and build bigger silos and sub-sub-specialize, which is what depressing numbers of people and institutions are doing, in fact we need to embark on something more difficult but a lot more interesting. Persons with deep expertise in one or more disciplines now need to operate at a meta-level. In one sense to say this is hardly to be revolutionary. In the United States the National Science Foundation and Department of Commerce initiated a series of far-sighted conferences in the early 2000's under the rubric NBIC, standing for nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science - Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance. While there was a curiously transhumanist twist to some of the thinking, the embrace of convergence was deeply important. (Full disclosure: I presented at one of these events.) 

A decade later I was present at the AAAS in Washington, DC, for the launch of an MIT report saying much the same thing - with a response panel including the White House, the head of the FDA, and one of the top officials of the NIH. 

From another point of view, it is certainly revolutionary to speak this way. Even within the sciences and in the relation of science to technology there is little advantage and much disadvantage to researchers at more junior levels in doing anything which spans disciplines. Indeed, at the aforementioned AAAS meeting, I recall Alan Leshner, its CEO, who moderated, summing up with a distinctly cynical "this will create hell with our science funding agencies if it is taken seriously" (I cite from memory, but he certainly used the H word!). Interestingly, one of the more memorable responses to the MIT report (I forget whose) suggested that we need a fresh discipline of interdisciplinary competence. That idea went no further, but I found it difficult to suppress a guffaw. Since I was in the front row I'm glad I did.

UNESCO's vision goes well beyond recognition that the sciences are converging and that they are converging with technology (and engineering). As the home of COMEST (the world committee on the ethics of scientific and technological knowledge) and the International Bioethics Committee, both lodged within the Social and Human Sciences sector, its recognition of the deep intersection of natural science and technology with the humanities and social sciences has long been institutionally acknowledged. 

How are we to learn to think in these new ways? I offer three suggestions.

1. Do not despise the value of rearranging our practices so as to develop fresh, intuitive, relational understandings. (In the lunch I was particularly pleased to hear from several of the UNESCO officials how often they meet each other, informally as well as formally, across the structural divisions of the five "sectors.")

2. Keep focusing on the questions. At C-PET our motto is "Asking Tomorrow's Questions." It is in the constant asking of questions that we intuitively frame the agenda that will enable us to interrogate data and transform it into usable knowledge. And, in the process, raise those hard questions that are driven by our deep and common human recognition of the centrality of wisdom in our appropriation and use of knowledge. UNESCO's founders knew how important this was, and it is instructive to review the extensive correspondence with which they engaged leading philosophers and theologians from around the world as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was welded. "Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers," wrote Tennyson in his remarkable early poem Locksley Hall (another quote from which, incidentally, is to be seen on the wall of the House of Representatives Science Committee room). UNESCO is a deeply humanistic organization, not in the sense of being opposed to religion, but in focusing the centrality of the human questions - from which alone wisdom flows.

3. To my mind, the single greatest source of our capacity to add value (in both the economic/market sense and that of "values" or ethics) lies in our ability continually to re-frame, re-shape, re-engineer traditional assumptions. A highly perceptive question over lunch led me to frame a blunt response in these terms. Every single day, read a little Thomas Kuhn and Leon Festinger. That is to say, Kuhn's fundamental concept of paradigm shift is central to understanding the continual rapid changes characteristic of exponential progress across various fields of knowledge. And Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance shows us what we are up against. In short, it is all about re-framing.

So my vision for UNESCO, with its deep commitments both to learning and to human rights, is to evolve from a prescient agency of reconstruction in the late 1940s into the global futures agency - where the disciplines come together and are transcended in a context tied to the particularities and needs of the global community and energized by a vision for human rights - a vision that will become yet more significant as our technological revolution continues to intensify.