This project will update a classic personality capture software module, expanding it from 4,000 measurements to 5,000 and updating it in several respects.

The Year 2100 was my first production version software module designed to archive aspects of your mind. It is a time machine for the imagination that helps you develop your own personal picture of how the world might be a century from now. In so doing, it measures and records your values, beliefs, hopes, and goals.  The original version was based on 2,000 predictions about the future, derived from a massive 1999 online questionnaire, Survey2000, sponsored by the National Geographic Society.  The user rates each prediction along two dimensions: how likely it is to come true, and how good it would be, thus measuring values as well as cognitions, attitudes as well as beliefs. Currently there are 2 x 2,000 = 4,000 measurements.  To reach 5,000 measurements, 500 new items must be added.

Upgrading the contents a decade later requires the help of people who are especially attuned to the "shape of things to come," so I have enlisted the aid of members of the Order of Cosmic Engineers.  They will be contributing a total of 500 items, in two ways:

1. I am extracting predictions from the online records of Cosmic Engineer meetings in the virtual world Second Life, and debates about the future in two online CE Google groups.

2. I am inviting individual leaders of the Cosmic Engineers to submit 20 statements each.  I ask them to think about the future, roughly a century from now, not to make firm prophecies but to ponder what important things might happen -- good or bad -- between now and 2100. If Each volunteer will write down 10 good things he or she hopes will happen, and 10 bad things he or she fears will happen, in the form of simple declarative statements predicting the things would happen. Each idea should be one sentence long, in clear English, and each sentence should focus on one idea.

If you want a sense of what the current predictions are like, take a look at the tables in a chapter published in the book Society Online: The Internet in Context, edited by Philip N. Howard and Steve Jones and published by Sage.

The new software will be placed in the public domain, so that anybody may give copies to their friends and acquaintances. That means volunteers will place their ideas in the public domain, but the software will identify which 20 ideas belong to each volunteer. Indeed, one of the many analysis modules will let the user see how he or she rated the 20 ideas of each volunteer, on a special page identified with the volunteer's name. If one happens to offer the same idea as another cosmic engineer, both phrasings will be included, but in the separate modules (questionnaire instruments) for the two of them. Removing similar ideas contributed by different people would detract from the record of the individual thought processes. In developing the original 2,000 ideas, I sought to avoid duplications, so we can afford a little redundancy in the new expansion.

The software will be updated, adding some conveniences that have been developed since it was originally posted on the Web. The text of the OCE prospectus will also be included, so the user can read it simply by clicking a button on the first control panel. Thus, by distributing this software free over Internet, we are spreading the word about the Cosmic Engineers, and increasing people's awareness of its ideas. A few other texts will also be included, such as a description of the CyBeRev Project, placing The Year 2100 in the wider context and helping a wider range of people see why this is a major step forward for humanity.

See: Sample new questionnaire items - Year 2100 user manual