Us Now - mass collaboration and government.

This is my first post here, so I should introduce myself, my name is Rob Evans and I'm a Telecoms Sourcing Manager and you can find out more about me here

OK, intro's over..

I've been reading about how collaboration can benefit the enterprise for a while now, but I  became aware of this interesting film on mass collaboration via a blog I read, Confused of Calcutta as JP was recently asked to introduce the premiere screening in London very recently.

Us Now takes a look at how this type of participation could transform
the way that countries are governed.  It tells the stories of the
online networks whose radical self-organising structures threaten to
change the fabric of government forever

Ivo's film (you might have recognised his surname, he's the son of Anthony Gormley) brings to the screen the discussion that's been going on the business world for a while, how can mass collaboration and organisational adaptation be used to benefit the Enterprise. Books such as Hamel's Future of management looks at how innovation impacts management within the Enterprise and Tapscotts' Wikinomics which looks at the new world of collaboration, innovation and value creation as a whole within the enterprise, have discussed this topic from the view point of business.

The film focuses on what this means for Government as opposed to the enterprise or business in general and creates a "convincing picture of the potential of collaborative software in a participative society" which is bound to have a knock on effect to business as we know it today. The film uses examples from Ebbsfleet United the collaboratively managed football team through to Zopa, the social lending business.

JP as someone who was involved early on in the project, identifies three themes:

• Can we do this? Can we bridge the generation gaps between the adopters of these technologies and the general population?
• How can we do this? How do we actually begin to realise the potential of these tools in government, both local and national?
• What can go wrong? What about the potential for such tools to do harm? How do we protect against misuse?

I think we can do it, the adoption of social tools is accelerating within the workplace, subsequently flowing into the mainstream, slowly, but it's happening. 10 Downing Street (Home of the UK Prime Minister) is already on Twitter, as is President Elect Obama. The third theme is the hardest to address and I'll be following the debate closely to see what is recommended.

Please feel free to comment, but directly on the Us Now blog may be better to continue that debate here.