The idea for a futures glossary emerged at the meeting of the German Futures Network in Schweinfurt in September of 2024. Lilly Herde, Ariane Steuber, Alexander Plé, Stefan Bergheim, and others wanted more clarity on key English terms in the field of futures studies and their corresponding German equivalents. This need had become apparent during the facilitation of futures processes, in their research, at conferences, and in the futures reading group. And they agreed to invest time in the glossary. Shortly thereafter, Sandra Schwarzmann and Angelika Neudecker joined the project team.
Initially, terms that are frequently used and that a team member wanted to explore were selected: assumption, imagination, complexity, resilience, uncertainty, responsibility, and probability. Other equally important terms were set aside, to be considered later: anticipation, foresight, time, and emergence.
No one on the team had previously worked on a glossary project but a helpful resource early on was the ISO 704 standard, “Terminology Work—Principles and Methods,” which describes key guidelines such as mononymy (only individual words are processed, e.g., “foresight” rather than “strategic foresight”) and monosemy (a word has only one meaning). Other glossary projects were also reviewed.
By the end of 2024, it became clear that there were similar needs in other languages. Soon, other initial participants joined the team: Reza Dehnavi for Farsi, Mariagrazia Berardi and Nicoletta Boldrini for Italian, Chloé Momas for French, and Priscila Grison for Portuguese. Soon, Martyna Mroczka for Polish and Mehmet Uymaz for Turkish joined the team. They were followed by Paula Schönach for Finnish, Stephanie Boustany for Arabic, and Irianna Lianaki Dedouli for Greek, as well as a team for Chinese. Researchers for Urdu, Hungarian, Swedish, and Spanish attended individual meetings.
Since late 2024, Christa Fraser has provided crucial impetus, placing great emphasis on academic rigor, correct and consistent citation, and clear English. She introduced the reference management program Zotero, proposed a citation style based on American Psychological Association (APA) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) guidelines, and worked with the team to develop additional rules for language and the structure and length of the entries. Her contributions aligned well with the terminologists’ drive to truly get to the bottom of the various terms. She later edited all English entries and serves as co-editor.
Starting in early 2025, the team gradually began meeting to discuss each term and review the initial draft text prepared by the respective terminologist. These were very lively and enriching meetings that spanned languages, cultures, and disciplines. English served as the common working language. At the end of 2025, a meeting was held to ensure consistency across the nine terms that were under development at the time.
Local experts are responsible for the glossaries in their respective local languages. Each local version of an entry is not simply a translation, but considers local terminology, cultures, interpretations, practices, and sources. This involves a considerable amount of work. The English entries serve as a guide, and all entries for a given term strive to be consistent across languages.
The glossary project began as a learning journey for those involved. In the spring of 2025, the question arose as to whether the findings should also be shared with others. In other words, should we publish our findings and open the project to a broader discussion? Jan Mühlig proposed the idea of a freely accessible and flexible wiki and agreed to provide the technical infrastructure for it. Justyna Doherty had already been working with the team on the visual representation of the terms and the vision for the overall project, which can be found in the overview text on the homepage for each language. She led a meeting to design a suitable logo and developed it together with Heike Jane Zimmermann.
The Center for Social Progress, which had already formally hosted the network meeting in Schweinfurt, is formally responsible for the glossary’s content and paid for external service providers.
The original text for this page was written in German, translated into English using Deepl, and then refined by English Language Stewards.