We’ve been doing a lot of work involving crowd-sourcing lately, so I was intrigued this week when I read about a crowd-sourced documentary currently in production at the BBC.

Digital Revolution is the working title of an “open-source documentary” due for transmission on BBC Two in 2010. The four-part series will take stock of 20 years of change brought about by the World Wide Web, touching on zeitgeist themes like considering whether the web is a mirror of society, and whether the distractions of an always-on culture are permanently changing our brains.  

As a former TV producer myself, I am fascinated by this, the first attempt I have seen to genuinely crowd-source an entire documentary of record. The production team are already sharing their thinking online, blogging as they go, sharing theories and asking for experiences and stories to make the programme.

At later stages of production, the team promises to put rushes of the filming online and asking for advice from blog-readers about how the documentary should be pulled together.

It’s the meshing of web 2.0 and television in the production process, not just the distribution chain, that makes this a fascinating work. I for one will be pitching in my views over the coming months.