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...small alpine ski town of Davos has just entered its peak season. Every January, a lively mélange of global business magnates, world leaders, entrepreneurs, activists, journalists and intellectuals descend upon the Swiss village to ski, socialize and participate in the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. The five-day gathering, organized by the Geneva-based nonprofit, is intended to provide a platform to debate pressing global challenges. Not surprisingly, the recent economic meltdown is at the forefront of the agenda for this year's meeting - aptly titled "Shaping the Post-Crisis World" - which kicked off on January...
...World Economic Forum got its start in January 1971 when University of Geneva Professor Klaus Schwab chaired a centralized meeting of the key players in European business to discuss ways that their firms could catch up with successful American management practices. The success of the meeting led Schwab to create the European Management Forum as a non-profit that would facilitate such conferences on an annual basis. The choice to host the meetings in Davos, Switzerland - a town famous as a 19th century destination for Europeans seeking treatment for lung disease - was based on its isolated location and the privacy...
Shortly after the European Management Forum was founded, world events began to shift the focus of the annual meetings to encompass more global issues. The collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange system, which pegged the value of foreign currencies to the US dollar, and the Arab-Israeli War in 1973 introduced political and economic elements to the Davos discussions, and political leaders joined the European businessmen at the following meeting in January 1974. By 1976, membership in the forum was extended to the "1,000 leading companies of the world...
Finally in 1987, the organization solidified its new international status by re-branding itself as the World Economic Forum. The new WEF broadened its scope of influence by tackling the resolution of international conflicts, forestalling war between Turkey and Greece in 1988 by convincing them to sign the "Davos Declaration." In the years that followed, Davos became home to some of the most memorable diplomatic moments in history including the first ministerial meetings held between North and South Korea in 1989, the milestone sitdown between South African President F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela in 1992 and the 1994 draft...
...bill is 334 pages long and growing every day - with amendments and changes, the current version is up to 941 pages. Nobody wants to sit down and read nearly a thousand pages of legislation for fun. That's where readthestimulus.org gets all Web 2.0 on Congress: it's a forum where anyone who wants to can comb through a few pages of the bill and record their findings in a Google document. Volunteers can do as many or as few pages as they like. "We wanted people to know where their money was going," says Rob Bluey, director of online...