What is this site about?

This site was built to facilitate a "signals process", a methodology developed by the Institute for the Future to tap into the expertise of a distributed network of individuals. It runs on the open source Drupal platform.

What are some easy ways to interact with the content here?

1. Click Explore and click on a tag of interest
2. Add a rating at the bottom of any signal
3. Add a comment to any signal

How do I add information about me?

To add your bio, or review your personal options, click My account in the left side menu, then click Edit. You can add information about your webpage, add links to your social network profile, add publications, projects, etc.

What is a signal?

Signals are short entries that describe a signficant change. A signal comprises: a descriptive concise title, a number of tags (keywords), a summary of the change, a summary of the larger impact the change will have, and some sources that the signal draws on.

A signal doesn't need to contain a fully fleshed-out argument. It should be descriptive, and have a little reflection on its potential meaning, but by definition you don't really know what its full implications are, and you shouldn't assume that you can read too much of the future out of it.

So signals are early indicators of emerging issues. They hint at future disruptions. If we connect them with other signals, we may see them as the first wave of something that could rapidly grow in frequency and amplitude.

You can add a signal from within a group or at any time by clicking Create content > Signal in the left side menu. From the signal creation page, make sure to tick off your group name under Audiences if you are participating in one.

How do I know if someone has already added a signal about something?

The best way to find this is by searching the whole site. Use the search box on the left-hand side of any page to search through content by tags and body text. Search has an optional advanced menu which will let you filter by type of content or tags.

Can I save something as a draft before publishing it?

Yes, if you add [draft] to the title of your signal, it will not appear in any public lists of signals. It will still appear on your Dashboard, so you can come back to it. Don't forget to take [draft] out of the title when it is finished!

Does this have to be perfect?

No, no, no. We want interesting and good, but these aren't scientific or academic papers: they're more like conference talks, or well-done blog posts.

What are the different fields for?

TITLE. Not surprisingly, this is the title of the post. It should give browsers a sense of what the signal is about. Consequently, we have a small preference for titles that are descriptive or active (e.g., "New electronic tags allow for detailed studies of pelagic animal habitats and behaviors"); but depending on the signal, that's not always possible.

TAGS. These are keywords that can be used to cluster signals, make those cool tag clouds, etc.. A couple things to note:

1) When you start typing, the system will suggest some terms. Let it. Not only can it save you having to keep typing, it will help cut down on the proliferation of almost-identical tags.

2) More tags per signal are always better. Be generous.

If you want, you can look at the tag cloud for X2.

DESCRIPTION. This is the main text of the signal. This is where you talk about the event, trend, discovery, or whatever is is you're writing about. As a rule of thumb, 2/3 of the text in a signal will end up in here.

If you wish, you can also briefly describe some of the possible implications of the signal, and what it could mean for the future. So if the signal is about some experimental technology or laboratory procedure, the impact might discuss what could happen after its commercial development or widespread adoption. If the signal is about a scientific theory or discovery, the impact might describe the implications for future research, questions the theory or discovery answers, or questions it raises. However, impacts and implications are generally discussed in forecasts, rather than signals.

SOURCE. This is where you put citations to sources outside the X2 site.

How many citations should a signal have, and what kinds of sources are acceptable? Many of you are accustomed to writing articles with lots of dense footnotes; you don't have to that with signals, though signals based on a single source are usually treated with more caution or suspicion than those that have several citations. As for sources: Peer reviewed articles are fine. Popular magazines or newspapers are okay as sources as well, though in those cases it's really what YOU know-- or what illumination you can bring to the issue discussed in the source-- that is valuable. As for blogs and other popular sources, it depends on who's talking. Plenty of academics, entrepreneurs and scientists in the U.S. now have blogs, on which they discuss pretty serious stuff; to me, those are perfectly legitimate sources.

AUDIENCE. You'll have the option of bringing the signal to the attention of a particular group, by putting it into that group's RSS feed. This is, I believe, turned on automatically. Feel free to leave it on, as it doesn't restrict others from seeing your work.

X2 LINKS. These are links to other articles in the X2 system. As with tags, there's an autocomplete feature: you can begin typing the title of a signal, and the system will suggest titles that match it.

How long should signals be?

Signals are generally a few hundred words long, but the length varies substantially. At one extreme, my signal on "Chinese science: Young Scientists' Views" ( http://sciencex2.org/?q=node/328 ) is an example of a somewhat longer post, but much of the length comes from the extensive quotations I've put in the signal. At the other extreme is my post on "Global consciousness detector" ( http://sciencex2.org/?q=node/340 ) is just over 100 words, and is really too short to be very useful.

I see an "edit" option on virtually every page. Should this worry me?

So long as you don't click on it, no. One of the slightly scary qualities of many wiki systems is that almost every page can be edited by any user; for those of us who are accustomed to being prevented from wreaking havoc on a system, this can feel a bit like walking along a cliff without a railing. However, if you do stumble into the editing page of something you didn't mean to change, just close the window. Your changes will not be saved.

How do I find my content after it is written?

The Dashboard will help you track recent activity around your posts and your groups.

How can I save text to a signal while I'm reading on another site?

The Tools page lists two bookmarklets to help you save content to X2 (similar to del.icio.us bookmarklets, if you are familiar with this service). A bookmarklet is a browser bookmark that has some degree of functionality. Rather than calling up a piece of content, it calls up an action.

In this case, the bookmarklet let you start a signal when you're reading something on the Web. The idea is to make it a little easier to start a signal when you're doing your normal browsing of journals or discussion groups. Here's how it works: if you highlight some text, then click on the bookmarklet, it will open a new page with the highlighted text in the "Description" section of the signal. It will also automatically put the page's URL in the "Source" field. You still have to fill in the title, keywords, and implications, but it's good for getting a signal started.

What are signals from feeds?

"Signals from Feeds" are signals that are written based on RSS feeds from sources like scientific journals and science blogs.

Signals from feeds are NOT just articles from other sites copied into X2. Rather, we've taken advantage of Drupal's RSS reader functionality to make it easier to write signals based on things we're reading elsewhere.

How do you create signals from feeds?

If you're a regular contributor to the project, and want to set up a signal from feed, follow these steps.

SETTING UP YOUR FEED

This is pretty straightforward. Find a source you think is worth drawing on-- an interesting blogger, a scientific journal or society, etc. Look for an RSS feed icon on the site, or a URL (these often end in .xml). Copy that URL.

Now go to http://sciencex2.org/en/node/add/feed. This is the page that will let you create a new feed. Fill in the title of your feed, as many tags as you think will be useful, a brief description, and paste in the URL . You can also set the feed to discard unread items after a certain date, and to update the feed at certain times, but you probably don't need to mess with these.

When you're done, scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit "Submit." You'll then be taken to a new page (URL of http://sciencex2.org/en/node/XXXX) with the title of your new feed.

GETTING THE SIGNALS

This page will show the tags that will show up on signals made from this feed, expiration and refresh information, and at the bottom of the page, three links to

Add new comment | View feed items | Refresh this feed

Before you can get to work, you still need to fill your brand-new feed with content. Click on "Refresh this feed."

Drupal will then go out and grab a bunch of posts, and load them up for you. It'll also tell you how many points you've earned by creating the signals.

When you're ready to look at the signals, click on "View feed items," and you'll be taken to a new page (http://sciencex2.org/en/feeds/XXXX).

EDITING YOUR SIGNALS

This page will have a list of the signals that were just created, along with a little extract from the RSS feed.

If you do nothing, all these signals will disappear in a week. So when you find a signal that you want to preserve, you need to edit it. Underneath the signal, you'll see a line of commands--

Add new comment | Read more | [name of feed] | Source | Edit | Delete

if you click on "Edit" (I recommend opening the page in a new tab or window) you'll be taken to the editing page. I recommend opening both the signal itself, and the source document. An RSS feed often just includes the first couple lines of an article, so it's often helpful to do a quick scan of the source document and grab another paragraph or two.

However, DO NOT COPY AND PASTE THE ENTIRE DOCUMENT. This is a pretty much a violation of copyright, and even if the content isn't under copyright, it's intellectually lazy.

Also have a look at the tags on your signal-- they're the same signals that your feed has. (To get geeky, this means that that your signal inherited this property from the feed.) Chances are, you could make the signal a LOT more useful by adding more targeted signals. About 80% of the time I've got to kill off the generic signals and add completely new ones. The more tags you put in, the better-- tags are a major way we find content when we create new forecasts.

ONE MORE IMPORTANT THING

When you're finished tweaking the content, you still have to change the "Discard item older than" setting to Never. Otherwise, your signal will be automatically erased later. Now click "Submit," and you're done. Congratulations! You've just added to the future of science!

If you got back and reload your feed page, you'll see that the signals whose expiration dates you've set to "Never" now have Expires: 0 sec. You can quickly run through the page and see if you've forgotten to change the expiration date on any of your edited signals.