I am the co-founder, with Bruce McConnell, of Government Futures, a Washington-based consultancy.  Government Futures is an exciting and natural extension of my long-time fascination with the Information Age and the future.

I remember standing in the atrium of the Oakton, Virginia AT&T Long Lines building in the early 1980s and hearing Mike Brunner, the regional vice president, talk about the burgeoning Information Age. I had been in the computer industry for ten years by then, and thought I knew what he was talking about.

In 1993 or 1994, when I was at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, I saw my first website and was blown away. I just knew that the Internet was going to bring the Information Age to ‘Joe Blow’ and break down the access and usability barriers that had limited the impact of the Information Age on day-to-day life.

As the millennium was changing, I witnessed firsthand the awesome power of an unorchestrated, unauthorized, global exchange of information about Y2K readiness from programmer to programmer, engineer to engineer, maintenance mechanic to maintenance mechanic around the world. It was breathtaking – and a lost lesson when ‘nothing happened’. Something immense and incredible had happened but was invisible. Some say the Native Americans couldn’t ‘see’ Columbus’ ships because they had no experience to equate it to. Similarly, I believe that we didn’t see the forces at work in 1998 and 1999 that were enabled by the web and by the good will of people who shared information freely for the good of others.

At the wrong end of the dot-Com bubble I was Senior Vice President of a small company developing e-learning programs. The creative will and capability to produce an engaging, interactive learning environment were there, but network limitations, memory-constrained desktops, and reluctant client CIOs (no Flash in my company!) doomed the effort. I learned a lot about small companies and risk.

Along the way, I also became a self-taught futurist, excited about the benefits and possibilities of “planning from the future”, or as some would call it, strategic foresight.

And here we are today. The two trends of increasing internet capability and the willingness of individuals to participate in on-line communities (witness Open Source, Wikipedia, FaceBook et al) are converging and the Information Age has taken another giant step forward. The mission of Government Futures is to nourish the resultant possibilities and to focus the collective intelligence, indeed, collective wisdom, of the government-industry-public community on the possibilities of the future and the steps we must take today to get, collectively, to a brighter tomorrow.