Due to their flexibility and capacity, scenarios can be applied in numerous areas, e.g. strategic management, environmental assessments for public policy, technological Foresight, etc. [34, 52].
"We're just fulfilling one of UNESCO's roles, which is to offer an intellectual space for ideas to be discussed," says John Crowley, head of UNESCO's Research, Policy and Foresight Section.
The study centre has allowed Plan Ceibal to begin a prospective research process in order to provide the policy with foresight concerning the trends and possible scenarios regarding new technologies in education and the deployment challenges thereof in a systematic manner.
Generating knowledge for the use of policy-making, foresight shares a common ground of participative and policy-impacting challenges with the deliberative democracy theory.
Karl Wilding, head of policy, research and foresight at the National Council of Voluntary Organisations: "Self-regulation enables charities to work in partnership with local authorities".
To support its members' efforts, the OECD, in turn, has developed more integrated methodologies that combine conventional policy analysis, Strategic Foresight methods, and multidimensional measurement frameworks.
This qualifies social media an ideal solution for foresight policy making, even though depending on the digitalisation progress in a given society one must be aware to be stirring in a spectrum "from technocratic to democratic decision making" [24].
The objective of the developed software solution is to provide bottom-up information based on citizens' expressed opinions serving as the empiric groundwork for socially rooted policy development and foresight.
Much more than the one-way communication of the demand from policy-makers to Foresight practitioners, this phase should be conceived in terms of 'joint construction' of demand" [18].
