In the wake of crowd-funding and crowd-sourcing comes crowd-wisdom. Given the complexity and difficulty of many of the challenges facing humanity, the development of systems for improved crowd-wisdom can be seen as a major priority.

Researchers have shown that, in the right circumstances, people working together to forecast future outcomes can produce far more accurate results than individuals, even when these individuals are recognised experts in their field. Sharing and debating the results with others can quickly eliminate bias and sharpen predictive reliability. This interaction allows predictive markets to live up to their full potential as aggregators of insight from diverse sources.

This London Futurists event features Mike Halsall, Executive Chairman of slowVoice. SlowVoice has developed a range of forecasting platforms including the public market Almanis, which is a free service and open to the public. Mike will be sharing his views on the evolution of collaborative forecasting, and demonstrating the capability of the Almanis platform.

About Almanis:

The Almanis platform enables crowd forecasting, and runs competitions on predictions in fields including geopolitics, financial markets, emerging industries, social issues, technology, medical matters, economics, and even light relief. The site is open to participation for free at http://www.almanis.com/.

Participants can contribute answers, provide explanations for these answers, and suggest new questions. Participants gain credit for high calibre contributions, and become eligible for cash prices.

For more details about Almanis, see this recent Economist article, “A new type of prediction market”.

About Mike Halsall:

Mike Halsall is an entrepreneur in technology, construction and real estate. More recently he co-founded two substantial real estate funds in Luxembourg, successfully selling one to AXA S.A. in December 2006.

Mike recently co-established the UK Government’s civil service innovation challenge, involving Singularity University and Oxford University’s Said Business School. This challenge was open to 40,000 civil servants, and was won by a team from the Home Office.

Mike is also the UK Ambassador for the Singularity University, and is a contributor to UK Government reports on emerging technologies including the recently completed Blackett Review on Distributed Ledger Technology.

Logistics:

The venue (in central London) will be announced shortly.

Guests are welcome to arrive from 6.30pm onwards, when light refreshments will be available. The presentations and demos will start at 7pm. There will be plenty of opportunity for attendees to ask questions.

Thanks to support from Almanis, there is no charge to attend this event.

Please RSVP in advance, to help the organisers predict the number of attendees :-)

—Event Producer