Updated September 9, 2024

We are pleased to announce that INFER, a crowdsourced forecasting program supporting U.S. policymaking and analysis, is now the RAND Forecasting Initiative (RFI).

Building on RAND's 75-year legacy of rigorous quantitative and qualitative analysis, RFI is a new forecasting capability to support policy analysis and decision making with crowdsourced predictions from RAND analysts and an external global community of forecasters. This collective intelligence generates predictive trends and early signals that help augment traditional policy research tools and expertise -- and empower decision makers to navigate and better understand complex landscapes.

RFI aims to become the world's leading crowdsourced forecasting enterprise on policy-relevant questions. RFI remains committed to its forecaster experience, covering priority issues for policymakers, and delivering timely analytical insights that can support U.S. decision advantage.

INFER, short for INtegrated Forecasting and Estimates of Risk, was founded in 2022 as a new source of outside, diverse information for policymaking and analysis. The crowd forecasting program included a public site (INFER-pub.com) with the goal of expanding to government classified sites in the future. INFER was run by the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS) at the University of Maryland and Cultivate Labs, with seed funding from Open Philanthropy. Cultivate Labs will continue to support RFI.

We look forward to this new chapter as RFI. We welcome your questions and feedback at [email protected].

To learn more about RFI, visit rand.org/rfi.