Busy Day Imagining the Future

No stories today except what I did. I attended an all day meeting where I was told to imagine the future. What would my library look like in the year 2025. It was interesting. We were also asked to look at other companies as metaphors to figure out how my library meets those same sorts of services, etc. or how it would look if we could. They wanted me to imagine, so you can understand if I'm a little worn out to tell you a story. I did write today, though. I'm just not sharing it as it was a very messy Ten Minute exercise about a woman who sets out to settle a feud by calling up the Seven Devils of her childhood stories and using her own heart as the sacrifice whether the feud is settled successfully or not.

Back to the future library, though. MOOCs are in the news about what a cool idea they are but what really is going to happen to them, with them and so on. I had this idea that in the future, people could earn certificated for attending these free virtual classes and completing all the assignments and that my library was one of the certificate granting institutions and that it offered MOOCs in Groups where people could work together through a class so it wouldn't be such an isolated task and that way people would have something of a support system to help them get through the class beyond somebody answering email. These certificates would help people gain more skills they could put on their resumes that they make at classes we offer in partnership with some sort of staffing agency that also offers, with my library, a cloud based staffing service. We would fund all this through a grant, of course. And then with the other classes we offer in other skills and small business, etc, and through the skills learned in maker spaces, we would help people be able to start their own small businesses at home or part time or whatever. But what does that have to do with books? Libraries are more than books.

I think the group my library assembled to take on the task of helping to imagine the future is a good one. I met many interesting people today. But we were kept so busy I barely got to really chat with any of them. I guess I'll have to wait until next time.

The most interesting person I met today, though, worked for a non-profit homeless agency, and he said they had plans to end homelessness for vets and youth by 2015. That's incredible. I hope it's true. Then, he said, they were going to tackle chronic homelessness. Amazing work people in this city are doing. I can't wait to see how they do it.