I am passionate about powerful questions, and I have been thinking if we could organize a monthly contest in this online community: The Question of the Month.
This is the idea:
We contribute the questions that are most important to us and share them somewhere in here. We collect the questions for a month, then leave the community some days to rate the questions, and we can find out and publish the topfive questions every month.
Could that be a way to monitor what we are caring about? Could that be a way to make this community visible to itself? Not to say to explore the face of this (new?) community ...
Would you be curious to find out the best questions for the world? And then share it with the world ... and create conversation and coordinated action to inquire how to best solve them ...
What would be the best questions to guide the ratings?
Please share you resonance and build on this idea. If you have any ideas how we could implement this, please share your thoughts. There might be some statistic tools somewhere in cyberspace that could be used.
I am completely overwhelmed by the activity in this Now Online Community! So I am listening forward to the resonance this idea might create.
I have hosted a World Café last year on the topic of the moralisation of markets. In this café we have explored and collected »questions that should be answered in order to take wise decisions in respect to the moralisation of markets«. Don't ask me what the moralisation of market means (I never understood it – it was the topic of the conference where the café was a central communication tool), that is why the question was so complicated. 120 participants produced many questions, we made a collective rating, and we came out with a top ten list. If your enter TWCBayreuth as a search term, you'll see the graphic recordings and some impressions of the café. Some of the questions I have been touched most was: Who makes moral? Do we need a global moral for a global market? Can we afford moral?
So again: What are the questions that matter most for you?
What is it that we don't know as a community and learning and practice that we want to become conscious of as a question... and then engage it as a social research question? a question that when explored successfully will create breakthrough for those the World Cafe community serves?
Depending on the context, and the issues presented, good questions should touch the soul of the matter in a non invasive way. Questions starting with HOW are great to me, since there is a call for action and involvement to the cafe guests. Besides, appreciation of the past successes, just like appreciative inquiry suggests us, makes the process running.
Ulrich and all, I just added a doc under the "World Cafe - Fielding Research Group" in which I collected all of the questions on this site which could help us build TWC community. Visit and explore the questions and consider them for your own practice, a foundation for a cafe, or a way to build research to further TWC movement worldwide.
david isaacs
Aug 17, 2009
Luis Carlos Jacobsen
Thanks for the question.
Aug 18, 2009
John Inman
John
Aug 29, 2009