Ivo Gormley, director 'Us Now" film

Ivo Gormley, director of 'Us Now', a documentary film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the Internet, discusses some of the overarching themes prior to a screening at the Barbican arts centre in London.Us Now 'tells the stories of online networks that are challenging the existing notion of hierarchy. For the first time, it brings together the foremost thinkers in the field of participative governance to describe the future of government'.It's an ambitious film made over 18 months, and is primarily about self organizing participatory structures, from business to political power structures.Ivo essentially proposes that blurring boundaries between business and consumers, and citizen and state, are dependent on high levels of transparency, openness and trust in this interview.This point is reinforced by the various participants in the film, which include 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 and Mikey Weinkove.People filtering each other to maintain high levels of trust on sites, such as couchsurfing.com - "a worldwide network for making connections between travelers and the local communities they visit" ie providing somewhere to sleep - have had a surprisingly benign history with few incidents.The 58 minute long film is augmented by 20 hours of additional footage which didn't make the edit, and Ivo encourages you to remix the film to make your own version, possibly making counter arguments....I wrote a separate piece on ZD Net making some additional points and reviewing the film.