RAND and Cultivate Labs created a partnership in February 2024 to rebrand the INFER forecasting platform, and RAND launched the RAND Forecasting Initiative (RFI) in September 2024 with the goal of becoming the world’s leading crowdsourced forecasting enterprise on critical U.S. government policy questions. As we end the year, we are pleased to share the progress these changes have made to set the groundwork for integrating crowd perspectives with RAND expert analysis to aid in high-stakes policy decisions. This review focuses on key accomplishments and the impact of this work.
RFI Community Growth
RAND introduced the RFI platform (randforecastinginitiative.org), co-run by Cultivate Labs, as part of its broader offering to warfighters, the intelligence community, and analysts across government. Outside forecasters (and RAND staff since September) came together to provide real-time and updated predictions on global security issues. The strong participation and collaboration of the forecasting community on the RFI platform is reflected in the highlights for 2024 (note: the year-to-date metrics include INFER platform data from January before it transitioned to RAND in February):
- Total forecasts: 32,565
- Comments: 36,567
- Questions: 124
- Upvotes: 4,943
- Countries represented: 66
- Teams: 43% of forecasters participated on 114 teams
Research Support and Impact
Since launch, RFI has established collaborations with multiple RAND research efforts and their U.S. government stakeholders, providing valuable signals on pressing policy-related questions.
Effects of Russian Disinformation in Western Europe
RFI helped RAND’s Information Warfare Research Team collect predictive insights around the impact of Russian propaganda in Europe, focusing specifically on the upcoming 2025 elections in Germany. Forecasts gave researchers a one-year outlook of Russia’s potential influence on Germany, which plays a pivotal role in shaping the continent's response to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
Any significant shift in German public opinion or policy regarding Ukraine could have far-reaching consequences for the conflict's trajectory and broader European security. By closely examining the methods and effectiveness of these disinformation efforts, researchers aim to develop more robust countermeasures and resilience strategies, according to RAND’s Information Warfare Research Team.
China’s Ability to Produce Advanced Lithography Tools
RAND researchers investigating China's semiconductor industry worked with RFI to gather crowd insights focusing on lithography technologies. This effort explored how U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductor technologies are shaping China's strategy in the global AI leadership race.
Ying Yi Dang, a RAND Technology and Security Policy Fellow,1 became interested in crowd forecasting “as a way to draw out important insights about key factors in understanding China’s potential pathways for semiconductor indigenization.” Her teammates are comparing the crowd forecasts with forecasts from RAND analysts, and she explained, “the outputs will help inform proposed policy actions as part of a broader strategy for U.S. leadership in AI.”
African Security Issues
Researchers at RAND are shedding light for U.S. policymakers on critical under-examined security issues affecting the African continent and African diaspora countries. RFI forecasts will serve as a robust value-add for analysis and future publications.
“We see crowdsourced forecasting on security and democratic governance in Africa as a potential source of insights and opportunity for awareness that can enrich policymakers’ understanding of Africa,” said Marie Jones, co-director of RFI also leading forecasting efforts on Africa with RAND researcher Alex Gerber. “We plan to use the forecast outcomes to inform future publicly published commentaries.”
Global Security Forecasting
RFI supported a U.S. government stakeholder in collecting predictions on an assortment of security hotspots around the globe. These included assessments on economic crises in South American and African countries, risk of adversarial action in the South China Sea and Yellow Sea, China’s AI technology, and conflict and security in Syria.
Forecasts are being used as part of a broader effort to understand the likelihood of high-impact, low probability events to create better awareness among decision-makers.
Biowarfare and Pandemics
RFI began collaborating with a research project at RAND exploring the long-term risk of pandemics and other high-consequence biological events caused by human bioengineering. Questions from this effort will launch in the new year.
Enhancing Forecasting Capabilities
To maximize high-quality contributions from forecasters on RFI’s priority focus areas, RFI continued to support and implement several specialized programs:
- Pro Forecaster Program: A selective cohort of 50 top-performing forecasters who are dedicated to assigned monthly topics of priority for stakeholders and invited to exclusive meetups with subject-matter experts. Pros outperformed the crowd consistently throughout the duration of the 2024 season (see Figure 1 below).
- Team Lead Initiative: Passionate forecasters assembling and guiding teams of fellow forecasters on collaborative efforts on RFI.
- RFI Adjuncts: A new role created exclusively for 6 Pro Forecasters hired to work directly with RAND analysts as mentors enabling forecasting best practices, including integrating dynamic forecasts into research.
“I’m enthusiastic about the [collaborative nature of] the RFI Adjunct role as this will help Pros gain from the deep knowledge of RAND subject matter experts, while simultaneously training these researchers to improve their own forecasting skills,” said new RFI Adjunct and long-time forecaster Scott Eastman.
Figure 1. RFI Pro Forecasters Outperformed the Crowd in 2024
This chart illustrates how the RFI Pro team’s Relative Brier Score evolved throughout the 2024 season (with lower scores indicating higher accuracy). Each point shows the impact of a resolved question on their cumulative score. The downward trend reflects their consistent outperformance of the crowd over time.
Future Direction
In 2025, RFI will move into its next phase of refining its methodologies to grow the scope of impact for decision-makers. This includes building out team infrastructure and capabilities to meet the needs of an expanded research agenda for new RAND research teams and government sponsors. RFI will also enhance platform capabilities for research analysts and continue its goal to build a cadre of trained forecasters inside and outside of RAND.
RFI has made significant strides in its inaugural year, demonstrating the value of diverse and dynamic forecasting in policy research. We extend our gratitude to our forecasting community, RAND researchers, and government stakeholders for their engagement and support. We invite interested individuals to join our efforts as we continue to advance evidence-based decision-making through forecasting.
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1Ying Yi Dang is a Technology and Security Policy fellow at RAND through December 2024; for more information on the fellowship program, visit www.rand.org/tasp-fellows.