Last year Data For Action did some work on developing Insight Infrastructure for the sector. As part of this work we experimented with using tools to gather questions people wanted to be able to answer following our Question Based approach to data and insight. We think taking a question based approach can be helpful and that it can be even more helpful if we can do this out in the open and collectively determine which questions we should focus our efforts on.. Our process intentionally asks users to consider what answering their question could mean and what they could do if they had an answer. We think this is a vital part of taking action.

The experiment was pretty simple, using Airtable to gather questions and Softr as a way to get some sort of ranking. The general approach seemed to be one that was fairly effective. So we have at various spare moments been developing a version 2 of our Question Bank, and we’re now putting it live.

What do we hope to achieve with the Question Bank?

We hope to do a couple of things.

Firstly we hope to gather an active group of users who submit questions and help define which questions are most important to work on collectively, and then hopefully go about answering them. A tall ask, but we believe in collective action and hope the Question Bank can be something which helps.

Secondly we hope to offer groups and organisations a simple tool which allows them to take a question based approach to their own work.

What features does the Question Bank have?

• The Question Bank allows users to submit questions according to our format.
  On submission questions are checked against existing questions in the bank, with an attempt to reduce duplication

• Users can respond to questions, with ability to embed from (many) external URL’s

• Questions are continually ranked by users so we build an algorithmic ranking

• Users can also endorse and follow questions to be kept up to date if there are responses to questions

• Questions are automatically categorised

There are some additional features which allow users to create groups with private questions

• user created tags

  

• kanban tools

• different ranking options

• and even the ability to rank and prioritise the responses to questions as well as the questions themselves.

Feedback

We’ve put a feedback link in the navbar (when signed in). This links to an Airtable form to supply us with feedback. Feedback would be greatly appreciated, helping us to really see if this is useful to people, and what other features and fixes(there are likely to be some!) we need to focus on.

Final thoughts

As always we hope our work adds something to the commons, supports knowledge infrastructure and is useful!

Have a great weekend