Tuesday 28 September 2010

Predicting the future – what's up for European standardisation in this decade until 2020


I am currently reading an interesting essay from Elena Esposito on the fictionality of future realities (“La realtà della finzione nella società moderna” - available in German translation in the edition suhrkamp under the title “Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität”). Elena Esposito is professor at the University of Modena and Regio Emilia and one of the leading European sociologists in the tradition of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory. This essay is fascinating as it puts the rise of the novel as the increasingly predominant form of fiction in the 18th century into relation with the developments in mathematics in the area of stochastics and calculus of probabilites at the same time. And it shows the element of fictionality in the predictions of what is going to happen and how high the likelihood is.

To me this essay is a bit like a disclaimer for a piece of work that I did last year in the context of my participation in EXPRESS – the expert panel on the revision of the European Standardisation System that had the task to develop recommendations for European standardisation with the horizon of 2020. As input to the discussion I had developed a so-called PEST analysis looking at the four key aspects of political, economic, social and technological challenges for standardisation in the new decade. And I tried to clearly align my analysis with some – as precise as possible – policy recommendations in the area of standardisation. 

I received some encouraging feedback about this document. So I put it up on slide share. 




Happy to receive further feedback, criticism, whatsoever.

Any reactions?
Am I totally off track or would you share some of the predictions?
What am I missing?

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