Europe, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Human Rights

RIGHTS: Dropping Knowledge, Picking It Up

Jess Smee

BERLIN, Sep 12 2006 (IPS) - Asking questions. This everyday activity is the key to sowing the seeds of change according to Dropping Knowledge, a German-U.S. non-governmental organisation which hopes to germinate those seeds online, and create an unprecedented database of the pressing social themes of our times.

To gather answers to their hundred most pressing questions, Dropping Knowledge gathered 112 international thinkers – a who’s who of alternative thought – in central Berlin Saturday.

Among the conundrums to chew over were thorny issues like: Will war end? How do we choose whose lives are most valuable? What’s God’s religion? Would there be war if the world would be run by women? And what is today’s most important unreported story?

Sitting around the table were the famous, like director Wim Wenders, human rights campaigner Bianca Jagger, globalisation critic Susan George and also a panoply of grassroots activists, including Tiananmen Square victim Wang Dan, Bolivian human rights activist Oscar Olivera and the former Ugandan child soldier China Keitetsi.

It was held on Bebelplatz, the square which is famous for the 1933 Nazi burning of the books.

Its organisers hope the event will spur activism to replace apathy. Cuban writer and poet Jose Manuel Prieto, one of the panel, welcomed the inclusive grassroots nature of the project.

“This harks back to the direct democracy of Greek times,” he told IPS ahead of the thought marathon. “It is about challenging our preconceptions and challenging accepted norms. That serves as a good example for many states.”

For almost seven hours the panelists unraveled the questions, which had been cherry picked from more than 30,000 posted on the Dropping Knowledge website by curious minds of all ages and nationalities. Subjects covered spanned ecology and sustainability, international politics, science and more personal themes like what values a child should be taught.

Each panelist’s responses – which were articulated in a rainbow of languages and dialogues – were recorded by digital cameras. The resulting 600 hours of musings and suggestions will be translated and catalogued on the Internet.

Dropping Knowledge hopes this will spark online dialogue to create the web’s most comprehensive database for social topics on its homepage.

Its organisers have catalogued 23,000 problem classes, encompassing every issue that an NGO has touched on over the last 20 years. These will be organised under an interlinked selection of 600 themes (such as climate change), which will then be divided into 25 main categories (like the environment).

The aim is to spark a global discourse across subjects and cultures. Dropping Knowledge believes that this is “urgently needed as a prerequisite for democracy, for the prevention of the predicted clash of cultures, and for the search for convincing solutions to pressing, unresolved questions.”

Any concerned individual is able to post their own questions, submit their own answers to any question and reflect online on any topic under discussion.

One look at their website and it is clear this is already well under way. At the time of writing the liveliest online debates were sparked by the questions: How rich would everyone be if we distributed everything equally? And, why has a big company like Allianz no social responsibility and fires 10,000 workers in Germany even though they have a big profit?

“It is an exciting project, something like an alternative Wikipedia,” panelist Eliot Weinberger, the U.S. author of the much-lauded anti-war book ‘What I Heard About Iraq’ told IPS..

“It’s certainly ambitious, but how could I not take part? Living in the U.S. in the Bush era, the only source of opposition is the Internet. The web is the natural home for this venture.”

The Berlin-based commercial filmmaker Ralf Schmerberg was one of three founders who came up with the idea of Dropping Knowledge. Following the war in Iraq, Schmerberg said he wanted to set up something new and “not just run around waving peace flags.”

Certainly unprecedented is the bringing together of people of such diverse life experiences. Never before have the co-founder of U.S. technology giant Sun Microsystems, a Buddhist monk, a Holocaust survivor and the forensic scientist who identified Hitler’s skull shared a table.

Udi Aloni, an Israeli filmmaker who documents the trauma caused by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said that the proactive hands-on venture is an example for inspired individuals across the world.

“It’s about time that something like this happened,” he told IPS. “It’s so easy to sit back and criticise or react to other peoples’ statements. Finally it’s time for alternative thinkers to generate fresh ideas.”