Thursday, December 16, 2010

Us Now film review and thoughts

Us Now is a documentary film that asks "Can we all govern? Us Now looks at how 'user' participation could transform the way that countries are governed." [vo.do]. I highly recommend seeing it soon as you have a spare hour (and maybe a few minutes to ponder afterwards). [Watch it on watch.usnowfilm.com or youtube/usnowfilm or download using p2p & bittorrent from vo.do/usnow]

While I always knew about collaborating, helping and sharing ideas and work are great in projects such as Wikipedia, Linux and open source software, rideshare and more, I actually never heard of coutchshare, momnet, management of a soccer team (in England) and even amazingly funds and investments through individuals, helping bands get gigs and even albums made by commenting on good tracks and even contributing some money for them to get studio or air time. These examples only scratch the surface of what can, will and IS being done by collaborating, helping and sharing ideas, work and decisions.

These collaboration tools are really amazing when it comes to those individual things described but this can be much more powerful when applied to bigger impact things such as Government spending, policies and so on. There can be many, many useful places to think about collaboration of thoughts, ideas and even work as we see with many, many projects already happening everyday and probably since the dawn of time!

I think this will play a large role in the future of not only our society but dare I say our humanity and civilization as a whole. Sharing our ideas, knowledge and experiences not only makes our life great but it also benefits everyone. The right and qualified people on particular subject matter are always needed but I also think that any average person can have enough experience and knowledge to contribute to those kinds and more of the conversations, topics and help in decision making or simply question things from their perspective. Having devil advocates always proved a good thing in small groups, imagine having the entire world to help in whatever you can imagine! 

This is an amazing time to be alive, our human population is large and growing thanks to our technological,  medical, chemical, biological and, well, all the topics in the world (and the universe) that we have made serious advances in. This is only possible by our collaboration, sharing our knowledge and learning, experimentation and further observation and advancing our science, engineering and so much more!

The only thing that seems a little lacking is the field of our governing ourselves (and religion but I will not get into that). Most of those ideas are from ancient history and even those things that have been adopted are still very lacking. It's very clear that there will be a new way for us to manage ourselves in the future. True democracy will come when we can accept decisions that a majority agrees on, transparent systems using web technologies that are open and standardized. But I'm sure these will be finally tuned as we grow in the new society.

I think it makes a lot of sense to combine some of the ideas from Future by Design which I reviewed much earlier this year. Although it sounded more like a pipe dream at first, after seeing 'Us Now' it makes much more sense when thinking about resources based economy, together with these sharing technologies that really wire us all together, and help decide collectively as opposed to 'mechanically' as they said in Future by Design or how it is done now and for the past 100s of years, decisions are made by few elitists at the top that, for what ever reason, got there...

When we put our minds together we can accomplish anything, think about how the internet, the truly global network connecting all of humanity together can really take this civilization further and into the future into a much better place for all of us. I think many already agree that so many things are wrong in our civilization (money and government being the top problems), so we really all need this type of system and I think it's not a matter of IF it will be implemented but rather, when and how it will happen.

We all know the saying that two heads are better than one, will in this case we have the entire population (that can access the internet - for now 1 or 2 billion).

Let me know your thoughts!

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