Platforms for information gathering

One of my assignments for my digital badge in futures studies was to choose a platform for storing and retrieving online articles, posts, and content. The goal is to do regular "scans" of news, books, and web chatter to understand trends in a wide range of areas (social, political, environmental, economic, technological) as well as industry-specific trend (in my case, museums). In order to scan effectively, you need a place to store the articles of interest.

I've chosen Evernote.

I've used it for a few months now, so this will be a more formal use of a known platform for me. It has good visual display for information retrieval and integrates with social media sharing and blog aggregators.

My intuition says that the trick to good scanning will be to selectively save articles. I will have the tendency to save everything, but my goal is to keep up a strong filter and only save things worth looking at again.

Digital Badging Project Begins!

I'm a test pilot for Center for the Future of Museums' digital badging project. I'll be testing the concept of digital badging and at the same time earning my own badges in futures studies. I'll forego any other introduction, and dive in to lessons learned from my work today.

The first badge is in Scanning for Change, and its role in strategic foresight. My takeaways so far:

- The vital importance of "out-reading the other guy.
- The big question: how to organize what you have read, are reading, and want to read, in a way that you can recall and access it later. I am very into organization and process, and this is something that I haven't found a good solution for ... look for that in the coming weeks.