I have done quite a few hours of interviews, plus a workshop, to try and gather together ideas for how social technology might develop over the next 15 years. I’ve spoken to as wide a group of people as possible, from tech entrepreneurs to CTOs to activists to 3rd sector experts, and I’ve had a massive amount of information and ideas to process.

I’ve made a start with that processing by distilling everything down into keywords and phrases, and then grouping them together in a sensible manner and making the mother of all mindmaps to try and impose some order on it all. I’ve put aside for now the concept of type of change, e.g. predetermined or uncertain, and instead tried to find similarities in theme instead. It makes for an interesting view – you’ll need the full size image to read the text, though, or download the PDF.

There’s undoubtedly stuff that’s missing from this mindmap. It’s not supposed to be all encompassing – indeed, I don’t think that would be possible – but I did notice that no one really talked about gaming, for example. Now that may not ultimately affect the scenarios that I’m going to be writing because so much of what’s important on this map is not about specific technologies but more about behaviours, cultural shifts, etc. That said, if you’re into gaming and want to add your thoughts in the comments I would love to have my intuition double-checked! Equally, if you think I’ve missed anything else that you feel is crucial, please comment.

My next task is to try to pull out a sense of movement from these themes, and to come up with some scenarios. Expect another blog post soon!