Future Here Now: Future Ready Communities, next steps

The last two weeks’ posts dealt with some practical steps for using our understanding of how the future will be different from our past to drive more effective approaches to your business or organization, and to your own mindset. We also explored how some of the Ground Conditions that look like they’re going to underlie our future are likely to play out in our communities — cities, neighborhoods, and any collection of people who share a space or purpose.

Today we wrap up that question with some of the next steps that community leaders can take to help their communities adapt.

All of the posts in this series have shown you practical, hands-on techniques that you can use to build your future readiness today. Some of the posts in this series have been available to everyone, while others have been paywalled. If you have not gotten all of these posts, you can get the full archive, as well as all future posts and other tools by subscribing to Medium.

You can start building a future ready community today with a few steps. I won’t say these steps are simple, because they won’t happen overnight. But you can start almost immediately.

• If you don’t already have one, develop an open data portal — a web site that gives as much access to public information as humanly possible. This should include city, county, transportation agency, you name it. Any of that information that’s technically supposed to be available to the public, but usually hidden away in some…