In early 2003, social issues-based filmmaker Cindy Gantz was working with activist and founder Jackie Northway-Wallace on a film about the U.S. peace movement. At the same time, film and commercials director Ralf Schmerberg was also in the U.S, shooting anti-war demonstrations and gathering footage of international protests across the globe. Coming together in New York City, the three discovered that they shared a common perception: the global mass media was not giving the peace movement due attention. Millions of people around the world were raising their voices and not being heard.
“We wanted to provide a platform for people to have a voice and to have their voices matter,” says Cindy Gantz. “We came up with the idea of a questions-based practice, encouraging people to ask questions, because that’s really where all knowledge and all learning comes from. Dropping Knowledge came from asking ourselves the questions — How can we have a voice? How can we provide a platform? — and we decided to promote this question-practice as a way to further all learning.”
By finding out people’s questions, the three reasoned, they could inspire new answers and, through community dialog, build consensus around new sustainable solutions. “In this day and age, people are searching for meaning and purpose,” says Jackie Wallace. “We decided to create a platform for people to share knowledge and to grow solutions from the ground up, to create new visions together on an international scale.” With founding support from the Mark & Sharon Bloome Fund and the Wallace Global Fund, the founders set about realizing their vision to create a freely accessible platform for global knowledge-sharing.
Enter Professor Hans Uszkoreit. Listening to the founders at a reception in Berlin, the Scientific Director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) found himself inspired. Uszkoreit proposed not only creating the new web service using next-generation semantic web-technology, but structuring the new platform around a database of 23,000 social topics compiled over decades by the Union of International Associations. That way, interested individuals, organizations, corporations and NGOs could come together around shared topics of interest and expertise, engage in discussion, ask and answer questions, and create new partnerships around new sustainable initiatives which, if successful, could proliferate. In the autumn of 2005, Allianz Group joined Dropping Knowledge as Founding Partner, convinced that an initiative created to unite people around crucial global themes like climate change was one worth supporting, and that a mutually inspiring partnership with the new NGO could be realized.
In September 2005, dropping knowledge, under the direction of co-founder Ralf Schmerberg and the staff of Dropping Knowledge e.V. launched the ‘Ask Yourself’ question outreach campaign. One year later on September 9, 2006, 100 questions reflecting the topics of greatest concern to the global public were asked at the first Table of Free Voices. The resulting audiovisual archive seeded a new free and open platform for the sharing of the world’s knowledge. And that was just the beginning…
Dropping Knowledge Dnternational
In October of 2006, Dropping Knowledge’s board of directors authorized a reorganization of Dropping Knowledge. As of December 2006, the core functions of Dropping Knowledge were organized into a single organization – Dropping Knowledge International. Ceasar McDowell, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor of the Practice of Community Development ,and co-founder of the Civil Rights Forum, was asked to take on the leadership of Dropping Knowledge International. With years of experience in community-building, public engagement and the use of media to promote democracy, Dr. McDowell, together with the new Board of Directors, is guiding Dropping Knowledge International towards realizing its founding mission of fostering new ideas and sustainable solutions to the most pressing questions of our time. Dropping Knowledge International is a project of the Tides Center, a leading provider of nonprofit infrastructure services.
