According to the film "Us Now," more and more people are working together to get what they need:
Want a place to stay while you’re travelling? Visit couchsurfering.com, a website that will connect you with someone in your destination city who has a spare bed.
Got a great band, write great songs, but can’t get a record deal? Or maybe want to support rising stars in the music business. Go to slicethepie.com* “a financing platform for the music industry that enables new and established artists to raise money directly from music fans and investors.”
Need advice or information and don’t have anyone to ask? Try Horses Mouth: someone knows what you need, someone needs what you know.
Need a loan but don’t like banks (or they don’t like you)? Try the Zopa Bank, a marketplace where people lend and borrow money to and from each other.
Forget the loan, are you just fed up with high bank charges? Go to moneysavingexpert.com for help in fighting back. See how it worked here:
These are just a few of the innovations we see in Ivo Gormley's film Us Now, a joyful celebration of the power of people thinking and acting outside the box.
Take the soccer team Ebbsfleet United that is owned by 30,000 fans who get to vote on who gets hired and who plays what position (they’re currently on a winning streak). What fun it was to watch the fans moving players around on their computer screens and then there was the nail biting at the match itself (Ebbsfleet won, much to the relief of everyone in the audience at the film.)
Want to know how this kind of thing might work in the political world? See this Wikipedia entry on Open Source Politics.
At your first opportunity, watch this movie, but if there's a panel discussion afterward, as there was at SFU Vancouver last night, you might want to skip it: those guys did their best to squeeze every ounce of joy out of the event.
Want to see what kind of people have seen the movie?
*slicethepie seems to have pivoted to a review sharing site
**edited December 2018
