The future of WHF

The bad news is that I lost momentum over time and wrote very little near the end of the 60 days. It's hard to maintain yet another blog while juggling everything else including my original blog.

The good news is that I received some very positive feedback and enjoyed writing outside the box sorts of posts. Readers encouraged me to continue writing.

Where does that leave Western Hemisphere Futures?

I have to suspend this blog for now. I have too much going on over the next few weeks to pretend I can continue at the rate that I'd like to. That said, I hope to relaunch at some point in the future. 

I created a Western Hemisphere Futures Page on Google+. The goal is to talk about future issues like those discussed on this blog and share articles. It may take off or it may sit in silence. Part of that depends on me and part of it depends on the community of those interested in the topic.

Thanks to everyone for reading over the last 60 days and for all the feedback.

30 days left

30 days down and 30 to go with stage one of this experiment. How do I think it's going?

• I appreciate all the feedback, much of it positive.
• I've liked having a place to think and write about topics that seem to fall outside my usual blogging.
• I've written less than I've wanted to. Time to write is always a challenge and I've spent more time on my usual blogging than here.
• That countdown clock looms over me every day. Whatever direction I take this, I need to write more.
• I've enjoyed the freeform write about anything, but I may need to give this blog a bit more direction if I hope to get some useful longer essays out of it in the end.

So, it's not going quite as well as I had thought at my most optimistic, but I'm still finding it to be useful and entertaining.

This blog will end

This blog is an experiment. Given that I want to approach this with a "fail fast, fail cheap" mentality, I'm setting an end date for this blog right at the beginning.

In 60 days, on April 23, 2012, I will reevaluate the purpose for this blog. I will review the posts I've written. I'll solicit feedback from readers. Then I will decide if it should continue and get another 60 days of life, perhaps with a renewed or altered focus.

This blog will get at most two extensions. At the latest, it will end on August 23, 2012.

Introduction

Welcome to Western Hemisphere Futures. This blog is intended to think outside the box and do something different than the typical analysis of the region.

It's about future scenarios 5, 10, 25, 50 or even 100 years into the future. What's the worst case? What's the best case? And perhaps most importantly, how do we as a hemisphere build that better future.

I want to talk about moonshot style projects, not small gains. How do we get crime below 5 homicides per 100,000 in every country in the hemisphere? How can we get malnutrition rates down to zero? How can we create effective regional institutions? How can the hemisphere create an abundance of cheap and clean energy?  And the ultimate moonshot project, how will Latin America reach the moon?

I want to talk about debates that are barely present, but could soon matter to the region. How does Latin America deal with the infrastructure for self-driving cars and private sector drones? How should the region manage its own parallel internet? How will criminals profit from technologies not yet created? What sorts of regulations should governments pass for the ethical treatment of robots or to manage nanotechnology safely?

This blog is a risk. I'm going to try to put some difficult and challenging ideas out there. I'll be wrong a lot. I may decide to shut it down in a few weeks or months if I run out of energy. I make no promises.

This should be fun.