I’ve been a big fan of Clay Shirky since I read ‘Here Comes Everybody’, and he’s recently been featured on TED talking about how the open source model of organising, or self organising, groups of hundreds of people can be an incredibly powerful way of producing software, not just technically but democratically. Specifically, he references Git, which unlike many other Version Control Systems (VCS), operates in a distributed way, that is there isn’t one central place or repository - everyone who is participating has access to all the source code and all the source code history. As he explains, this is a remarkably powerful way to foster distributed collaboration, but so far this has mainly been harnessed by the open source software community. This video really gets you thinking about the possibilities of version control for other purposes, such as politics, law, business, etc. The video is just under 20 minutes and I highly recommend watching it.