Welcome to the Illative Blog! This blog is an initiative by the Knowledge Impact in Society (KIS) project at the University of Saskatchewan. If you are not already familiar with the KIS Project, we are one of eleven projects across Canada focused on connecting academic researchers and community participants in discussion and dialogue. In our case, the focus is on the issues and challenges facing agriculture and rural communities.

One way KIS is sharing knowledge is through the Illative Blog. Blogs are websites that allow for regular entries or updates on any range of topic. The ability for you, the reader, to leave comments about an entry makes a blog a useful online discussion tool. You will find that our entries take current issues and events and draw inferences about the future of the industry and/or the future of rural communities.

One of the primary goals of any individual or organization is to try and "see" into the future, and based on that view, to determine how to properly adapt to and influence what is coming. Since the future can never be known, people can only make inferences about it. While these inferences can be based in part on what has happened to date, the past (as well as the situation today) cannot be relied upon to inform the future; the world is simply too complex. Instead, what is required are images of the future state of affairs, images that emerge from the use of analogy, from informed intuition and from imagination. It is these images that people react to when deciding how to adapt and position themselves for the future.

The purpose of the Illative Blog is to provide a forum for people interested in agriculture and rural communities to use their intuition and imagination to look into the future and determine where they think things are going. The word "illative" means "relating to or having the nature of inference"; therefore, the discussion in blog entries and comments will use inferences as a basis of the discussion.

The contributors to the Illative Blog come from a wide variety of places. While the academic and community partners associated with the KIS project at the University of Saskatchewan are important participants, the Blog is open to everyone that wishes to participate. The only requirement for submissions is that they be considered and informed. You can submit an idea for a blog entry by clicking here.