A film project about the power of mass collaboration, the government and the Internet. In his student flat in Colchester, Jack Howe’s staring at your computer screen. It is picking the team Ebbsfleet United FA Trophy semi-final against Aldershot. Worldwide 35,000 fans others are doing the same, because together, they own and manage the football club.
If the distribution networks of people can manage complex organizations, such as football clubs, what else can they do? Now we take a look at how such involvement could transform the way that countries are governed. It tells the story of online networks, whose radical self-organizing structures threaten to change the structure of government forever. Now we follow the fate of Ebbsfleet United, a football club owned and run by fans, Zopa, a bank where everyone is the director, and Couch Surfing, a vast online network whose members share their homes with strangers.
The founding principles of these projects – transparency, self-selection, open participation – are getting closer and closer to the mainstream of our social and political life. Now we describe this transition and faces politicians Ed Miliband and George Osborne with the possibilities of participatory governance as described by Don Tapscott and Clay Shirky, among others.
