Before Glimt opened to forecasters, it had an audience at Sweden’s Folk och Försvar national conference. On 12 January 2025, Hypermind reported that Ivar Ekman of the Swedish Defence Research Agency, FOI, had unveiled the project, with King Carl XVI Gustaf in the room. The Royal Court independently confirms the king’s attendance at the conference in Sälen. Hypermind said the platform used its Prescience technology; Émile Servan-Schreiber described months of work with Ekman and Jonas Clausen Mork.
The launch story explains the platform itself. This account follows a different question: how a forecasting project became an invitation to citizens, officials and readers to participate in support for Ukraine.
An invitation from government and civil society
FOI’s January announcement presented Glimt as a way for people outside traditional intelligence organisations to contribute judgements about future events. Ekman argued that this could broaden participation in intelligence work. It was a proposal about who could help analysts, rather than evidence that every public contribution would be useful.
On 22 January, Servan-Schreiber connected the project to an argument he had made in his 2018 book, Supercollectif: democratic leaders should think together with citizens. He described collective intelligence as a resource democracies could use against dictatorships. That was his political interpretation of Glimt’s purpose.
The following day, he reshared Clausen Mork’s invitation to follow the Swedish defence minister’s example. The attached screenshot names Pål Jonson and shows a message encouraging public participation in Swedish support for Ukrainian decision-makers. It documents ministerial promotion of the project, without establishing anything about the accuracy of its forecasts.
French readers and EU diplomats
On 13 February, journalist Axel Gyldén’s LinkedIn summary of his L’Express article described questions on North Korean troops, Russian missile attacks, Ukrainian control in Kursk and Russian liquidity. Servan-Schreiber reshared it and invited French-speaking participants to join. These examples show how recruitment made the abstract idea of crowd forecasting concrete: citizens were being asked about specific developments that could matter to Ukrainian analysts.
On 30 March, he shared Sweden in EU’s account of a presentation by Clausen Mork and Ekman. The institutional post said Ukraine supplied questions covering both the country and developments elsewhere, with the aim of informing authorities’ analysis and decisions. The audience had expanded from an online public to a diplomatic setting.
Can emotional people make analytical forecasts?
A LinkedIn account dated 11 October, following a Swedish Embassy discussion, described an objection from the room: emotion might prevent ordinary people from making sound strategic judgements. It then recalled a civil-society participant’s response that people can take analytical responsibility when asked to think critically. The account’s author and the two speakers are unidentified, so the exchange remains an attendee recollection.
That exchange captures the practical test behind the endorsements. Public trust can bring people into a forecasting exercise; their resolved questions must then establish how well their judgements perform. The journal’s separate account of the Paris results addresses evaluation. Here the evidence shows Glimt’s widening reception, and the argument over whether citizen judgement deserves a place in strategic analysis.
