The Question Campaign
The practice of asking questions is at the core of our theory of social change. It is through asking—not telling—that we begin to ponder new alternatives and come to recognize multiple viewpoints.
DKI has pioneered the Question Campaign, a unique, simple and powerful tool to support the diverse global public to engage in dialogue, learning, and action for the social change it seeks. In the three years we have been developing, testing and refining the Question Campaign, it has proven to an effective means for engaging people from all walks of life to raise their questions to the world. We use social media — compelling ads and videos, online and on the ground, featuring powerful questions from the public – both to invite people to identify their questions, and to reflect back to them their own thinking about these questions and what action is needed to address them. As the question campaign unfolds we offer a public space on our website for people with common questions to come together and discuss why those questions are important to them. Our goal is to forge connections among people based on their common questions and, through those connections, to support these people, our partners, and the broader public to build shared understanding of the diverse experiences that inform their interest in the questions. Anyone is able to see, learn from, and participate in these discussions on our website. In addition, we work with our partners to connect these dialogue groups to our partners’ own work as well as to other organizations, networks, and people who have an expressed mission related to the question the group cares about and wants to see addressed in the world.
EXAMPLES OF QUESTION CAMPAIGNS
MIT/Technology and Culture Forum
Throughout the spring 2010 semester, the Technology and Cultural Forum (TAC) at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) invited the MIT community to consider “What is the most important question for the world?” TAC sponsors lectures and symposia that explore the role of science and technology in promoting positive, ecological, and economic change. In addition, they stimulate discussion about the ethical implications of scientific discovery and technological innovation. Through this question campaign TAC aims to support the MIT community to achieve two key goals: identify the issues it cares about most and connect to resources it has to address these issues.
Parliament of the World’s Religions
In 2009, DKI partnered with the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions to conduct a Question Campaign. The goal was to identify key questions important to the Parliament community around the world, and to use these questions to inform dialogue among the 6,000 people attending the fifth Parliament of the World’s Religions held in Melbourne, Australia on December 3-9, 2009
DKI launched in 2005-2006 by conducting a global question campaign that generated over 25,000 questions. On September 9, 2006, 112 visionaries from around the world came together to answer the global public’s top 100 questions at the first Table of Free Voices event, which took place in Berlin, Germany. The answers to these questions are now open to the public on DKI’s website. Among the content generated that day are some of the freshest perspectives on 8 of today’s most pressing themes:
•The Human Footprint, •Reinventing Economics and Expanding Opportunity,
•Human Rights and Social Inclusion,
•Knowledge Sharing and Innovation Acceleration,
•The Politics of Violence, Resistance, and Peace,
•Understanding and Shaping Power, and
•Your View.
Ask Campaign – DKI promotes the practice of asking questions through Daily Question ads and Question Portrait Videos, which together encourage the public to donate their questions. We conduct media outreach through our website, televised public service announcements, and online and print advertising inviting participants to raise questions they believe are of great importance and to submit them to our website.
Daily Questions Ads – We match individual questions with still images. These products are then distributed through the web.
Question Portrait Videos – We gather questions from people on the street, students in their classrooms, physicists in their labs, and artists in their studios— from all around the world.
DKI Question Campaign provides opportunity for people not often included in the democratic process to submit questions they care about. By sharing the questions and knowledge of people often excluded from public dialogue, we are giving them another vision of themselves and their thinking, plus we are creating opportunity for the broader public to learn from them and see them in a different light.
Selection Campaign – A discernment process that allows the public to move from raising individual questions to identifying and selecting the top questions to collectively address. DKI supports the public in creating a ranked set of top questions organized around themes and delivering them in a format that our partners and the public can use.
Learn/Answer Campaigns – At gatherings supported by DKI and our partners, the top questions framed by the public are used to support conversation and knowledge sharing among participants. At these events, participants’ responses to the questions are recorded and used as part of the content to create a specially designed online environment for the question. This Question Environment serves as a one-stop resource for questions. The Question Environment contains a blog that has contributors from all walks of life, and a resource wiki in which people and organizations share information, resources, and knowledge regarding the question. It also contains communities of interest: people who care about the question and want to examine it, engage in dialogue about it, and take action to address it. The site supports participants at the event as well as the broader public to both make and track commitments over a 1-year period to work on the question.
