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. That’s at least according to Don Tapscott, the best-selling author of Macrowikinomics and a guy committed to “rebooting” the world. So when I sat down with Don last week at The Economist‘s Innovation event in Berkeley last week, I gave him 8 minutes to outline how we can rebuild these global institutions in the digital 21st century.
Given his 8 minute limit, Don did pretty well. Arguing that for the first time in human history, we are all being mobilized on the same side, he argued that the real killer app on the Internet is saving the planet. 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. And Don 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.
Interested in participating? Don is looking for both volunteers and investors for this project and he invites anyone with an interest in saving the world to contact him on either Twitter or via email (don@tapscott.com).