The Social Network that the G20 leaders use to run the world..

Fascinated to find out today that the world leaders, civil servants and journalists attending the G20 summit use a social network to communicate with each other, share documents and create wikis about – well – how to run the world.

Developed by Open Text the G20 social network works as a website and also an iPad app. We had a quick look at part of it today: different countries have different icons – China, the USA etc, as do departments like Climate Change and Environment or Economy.

Viewed on iPad it’s almost a direct copy of the iPad’s native interface making it easy to follow and understand.

New information relating to any of those countries or topic areas pops up as a circled notification. Each country has a members list, a collection of documents and a shared wiki for discussions.

No – there is no “poke” facility, and sad to say the wiki is full of links to pdfs about policy not bitchy comments or “lols”.

Apparently in the G8 days – all communication was done on email until the world’s leaders found – as the rest of us have – that email is crap for organising complicated stuff on.

Now it’s all done over a tailor-made social network based around the models set up by Google Docs and Facebook … pretty interesting huh?