Us Now

Us Now
Directed by	Ivo Gormley
Produced by	Hugh Hartford (Banyak Films)
Edited by	Mark Atkins
Music by	Orlando Roberton
Release dates	April, 2009
Running time	60 minutes
Country	UK
Language	English

Us Now is a documentary film project "about the power of mass collaboration, the government and the Internet"

“ 'In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?' ” the film asks, and takes a shot at answering the question partly by its case studies, and partly in the debates with politicians and thinkers organised around the film’s showings"

As a Web 2.0 project all of the material generated during the project will be available to view online and the project will culminate in an hour long documentary to be released in April 2009.

Synopsis

The Us Now website describes the project as looking at how the internet could allow people to do away with politicians and run the government themselves. It says it will tell the stories of the online networks whose self-organising structures "threaten to change the fabric of government."

The project claims the founding principals of mass collaborative projects; transparancy, self-selection, open-participation, are coming closer and closer to the mainstream of social and political lives. Us Now describes this transition and confronts politicians George Osborne and Ed Milliband with the possibilities for collaborative government as described by Don Tapscott and Clay Shirky amongst others.

Contributors

Saul Albert

Giles Andrews

Lee Bryant

Alan Cox

Liam Daish

David Courtier-Dutton

Becky Hogge

William Heath

Shane Kelly

Ed Miliband

Paul Miller

George Osborne

Sophia Parker

MT Rainey

Clay Shirky

Tom Steinberg

Matthew Taylor

Don Tapscott

Mikey Weinkove