Iterating the workshop structure with Edinburgh Futures Institute

Workshop, co-design

Hosted by our research partner, the Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture & Society (CDCS), we ran one of our 100-year plan workshops in tandem with researchers from the Edinburgh Futures Institute, who also enhanced our current workshop design with insights from the broader futures sector.

Here’s the blurb:

EFI and CDCS welcome you to a workshop, collaborating with Flickr.org

The Flickr Foundation is a new institution created to preserve and display the huge Flickr photography collection – consisting of 10 billion photographs uploaded by users and institutions worldwide since 2004 to Flickr.com – for generations to come. This needs multi-generational thinking; a 100-year plan. A document that guides priorities and decisions, maintained by the community of the Flickr Foundation for years to come.

We welcome you to a workshop to discuss and develop what a plan with this long-term outlook should contain, and what it could exclude.

We will explore ideas around what a co-operative social structure around the Foundation could be like, what it should be responsible for, and how it would relate to the corporation which owns the codebase that runs Flickr and is responsible for its performance.

We also wove in more resources about future-y thinking like:

  1. Seven generation sustainability (on Wikipedia)
  2. Pace Layers from Stewart Brand/Long Now (see Stuart Candy’s blog/bibliography)
  3. Desire lines and navigation

Here’s the blog post we co-wrote with Bobby and Melissa from EFI.

Three men work in a testing facility. A person in a metallic space suit is suspended horizontally, supported by two others on either side. A grid pattern decorates the background.

Looking back over 2025

Here's a handy compendium of all the stuff we've done this year. Wheee!

Oreoluwa’s Midpoint Reflections

Flickr Foundation's Winter Research Fellow shares their reflections on the Fellowship so far and the next phases of their creative, archival research

New Podcast: How we made Flickr's community so nice

George talks with Rabble of Revolution Social to discuss her work designing Flickr and the model for an alternative internet with care, community and preservation at its core.