“Dropping knowledge is a global initiative to support the free and open sharing of knowledge among the people of the world. Born out of the unprecedented democratising power of the Internet, dropping knowledge employs advanced web-technology to empower the global public to ask the questions that matter to them and seek new solutions through community dialog.”
This organization has invited 112 persons on September 9th, 2006 to answer some of the questions people like you and me have submitted.
The moment I clicked on the short video on the homepage I become instantly intrigued with the enormity of scope and the freefall of its concept. Then I spent an hour mesmerised by the films, commercials, and ads. They have gathering all sorts of questions from the famous and not so famous and have presented their questions in videos and graphics.
Here is a sample of one of those commercials. It presents the question of Shanta Chatterji of Mumbai. The short fim is of such excellent quality: not only the content, which is thought provoking, but aesthetically as well. Even the ads are wonderful to look at (here, here, here, here, here, and here).
What scrambled my brain was Shanta Chatterji’s comment that:
“The time of competition has gone now. The time of cooperation has come.”
She said it with such faith and assertion that it brought tears to my eyes. I imagined how acts of sharing and cooperation might leave behind footprints along our journey to make our lives meaningful. Each act in itself is perhaps does not leave any remarkable trace, but in summation they do point us in a direction.
We are all encouraged to “copy, use, modify, publish, broadcast or otherwise redistribute any portion” the graphics and videos. They are protected not under international copyright law, but CopyLeft Creative Commons License. The only conditions of use are that we are not to use them for commercial purposes or in discriminatory way, and you have to reference its author. In this blog entry everything comes from dropping knowledge A very intriguing concept don’t you think?
The project wants people interested in the project to donate questions of their own and to rate questions submitted by others. I haven’t donated any question yet, but I have spent some time rating other people’s questions. It is really interesting to do this. Give it a try!
Initially, I thought a question is a question, just get in there and participate. Then I find out, quite early on, that a question is not a question, but much more… who is writing it, how is it worded, what do they mean, do they actually want an answer or are they just trying to present themselves, is there an implicit subtext, etc. Don’t shake your head; I am not trying to make the process complicated. I do rate the questions quickly, but there is a certain amount of background dialog going on in my brain.
I can’t wait to see the results of this round table discussion. They will presented on the site starting the day after the event.
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