Don Tapscott: The internet’s real killer app is saving the planet

All our global institutions — from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization to the International Monetary Fund to the G20 to the G8 — are broken, according to Don Tapscott, the best-selling author of Macrowikinomics.

In an 8 minute video interview on TechCrunch – recorded last week at The Economist‘s Innovation event in Berkeley – he outlined how we can rebuild these global institutions in the digital 21st century.

We need to rebuild our institutions around open source technology, wikis, social media and all the other distributed models that are shaping our networked world, says Tapscott, who has brought together a number of other leading thinkers – Jonathan Zittrain from Harvard and writers Parag Khanna and Richard Florida, for example – to participate in this ambitious project to reinvent the planet in our digital century.

It sounds highly if not over-ambitious.

Watch video

One comment

  1. Is it Leo Burnett who said “when you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.”

    Over ambitious projects are sometimes those that get the World to a next step.

    Several of us have been thinking along these lines. Time has come for this to happen.

    This Pull Platform for example is designed for this very purpose:
    http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/19484978058/a-global-pull-platform-to-engage-for-the-commons

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