I gave this talk at the Island Tech conference in Victoria, BC, providing an examination of dominant trends likely to play out in the next decade.

1. Future Proof: Top Ten Trends 2010-2020 By Kurt Cagle

3. Industry Analyst

4. Managing Editor, xmlToday.org

5. [email_address]

6. @kurt_cagle on Twitter

8. Petroleum OS Ends

9. The Great Dis-Integration

10. Smart Grid OS

12. Open Data/Open Govt

13. The Emergent Education Era

14. Bio-informatics

15. Hyper-Presence

17. A generation is both influenced by the preceding generations and influences the following generations

18. The exact boundaries of generations are seldom clear cut – think of a generation as aggregate behaviors.

20. Fixed income outflows – shrinking economy

21. Will place heavy demand on social services

22. Most heavily impacted by the Great Recession

23. Relocation into cities and near-suburbs – smaller houses or condos, city services

24. Will form bulk of the volunteer economy moving forward.

26. Architects of the Web, technical/engineering oriented, focused on standards and code

27. Independent – libertarians or civil libertarians, live agile methodologies

28. Distrustful of large institutions

29. Will have the biggest stamp on the technical foundation of the next decade

31. Nearly as large as Boomers ( Echo Boomers )

32. Very entrepreneurial

33. More likely to be involved in communication/media

34. Concerned about transparency of gov't & business.

35. Mashup generation

36. Environmentally sensitive

38. The Google Generation – information is pervasive and immediately accessible

39. Hyper-connected – always communicating

40. First post-corporate generation

41. Systemic thinkers

42. NeoTribalists

44. The Petroleum OS is now 150 years old, and dictates transportation, power generation, urban infrastructure development, financial systems, food production, political organization, education, marketing and media and nearly everything else.

45. The Petroleum Operating System is crashing ...

47. Global Oil Peak - 2007?

48. Demand Still Growing

49. Max Prod: 85 Mbls/d

50. Trough Oil: Everything from here gets harder

52. Demand Increases Price, Fixed or Falling Supply

53. Price Reaches a Peak, Dragging on the Economy

55. Gluts Become Smaller, Shortages Longer

56. Average Price Through Cycle Increasing

58. Without guaranteed reserves, credit dries up.

59. Without credit, businesses are forced into cash accrual model, with higher exposed risk.

60. Most mega-corporations are built with leveraged credit; as credit recedes, they disaggregate.

61. 2010-2020 is the Great Dis-integration.

63. Smart Grid – merging electrical production grid with societal information networks

64. Smart Grid supports localized, sustainable energy production, with intelligent creation, transmission & storage of power.

65. Consumers become prosumers, with those contributing to the grid gaining most benefit.

67. Centralized

68. Forces Segmentation

69. Vendor Lock-in

70. High Barrier to Entry

71. Forced Upgrades

73. Decentralized

74. Enables Open Standards

75. Competitive Cooperation

76. Low Barrier to Entry

77. Allows for Versioning

78. Benefits Users, Prosumers

81. Smart Grids allow community participation, and community member renumeration

85. High speed rail replaces air travel, save for light air craft

86. Light rail, e-busses, trolleys re-emerge

87. Trucking remains but becomes more local

88. Shipping favors rail, wind-driven ships

89. Most vehicles are hybrids – oil provides extra power, but is not prime motive power.

94. Physical manufacturing relocalizes, virtual manufacturing (software and services) globalizes

95. Management & marketing lose influence, technical/creative gain influence.

96. Corporations are either physical, local and persistant or virtual, distributed and transient (or both). In all cases, they're small.

98. Cloud - the virtualization of hardware

99. Software as a Service - the virtualization of stand-alone applications as sets of web service streams

102. Virtualization of government occurs as governmental functions become exposed as services in the noosphere

103. Virtualization of the media is already underway.

104. Virtualization of education is happening as the POS educational system collapses.

105. Each replaces top-down hierarchical systems with bottom-up distributed systems.

107. Introduces a search/query oriented view of the web.

108. Search services will retrieve collections of links to resources, packaged in various forms.

109. Update services will activate messaging actions based upon publishing of content.

110. Computational semantics will drive both search and publishing.

112. Social Media is absorbing gaming, conferencing, education, training and entertainment.

113. Social Media platforms will continue to emerge, eclipsing older platforms and services.

114. Social Media will also be foundation of Augmented Reality

116. High barrier to entry

117. Professional journalists

118. Editor provides gateway function

119. Branding is key

121. Low barrier to entry

122. Domain expert as journalist

123. Community provides filtering function

124. Search/Word of Mouth

125. Ancillary services driven

127. Orgs will expose both public data services and data editors via REST, XML and JSON

128. Gov't Big Data Standards – NIEM Framework

129. Semantic Web Matures: RDF/OWL & Linked Data

130. Businesses improve transparency via XBRL

131. Everything becomes ( somewhat ) intelligent

133. Educational systems fail to deliver competent graduates for information economy

134. Centralized curricula removes flexibility, targets generation of mediocrity.

135. Kids becoming idiot savants – knowledge at their fingertips, but with few tools to analyse it.

137. Distance learning decouples teaching from location

138. Education becomes life-long activity

139. Social education becomes biggest issue

140. 2010s will see an explosion of alt-education forms

141. Teachers, like journalists, will be the next professionals to face amateurization, to be replaced by guides, mentors and quisitors.

144. Financial transactions become transparent

145. Motion aware overlays enable in-place virtual worlds

146. People rent their lives vicariously.

147. Percentage of people who live and/or work in virtual worlds exceeds 30% by 2020

149. Standardization leads to bottom up revolution

150. Disintegration of private insurance monopolies in US

151. XML Based EHRs create distributed web, another part of the Smart Grid

152. Epidemiology, emergency response merge with Smart Grid (via US National Information Exchange Model, or NIEM)?

154. What replaces it will be distributed, emergent, virtual, communal, highly participatory and metaphorical.

155. Declining resources and over-stressed ecosystems will increase conflict globally, but will also hasten the transition to sustainable models

156. These changes will come from the bottom up.