Forumblog.org - The World Economic Forum Blog

TV documentary about 40 years of the World Economic Forum

The first German television channel ARD will has aired a 30-minute documentary about the 40 years of the World Economic Forum on Sunday 17 January at 13.15.

Reporters Axel Finkenwirth und Eckhart Querner were able to follow Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman of the Forum at numerous events in Davos, Jordan and in China. Entitled “Magnet der Mächtigen” (Magnet of the Powerful) the documentary will be is availble on demand for several weeks in the ARD Mediathek.

 

Update. The documentary will be aired in English, Spanish and Arabic on Deutsche Welle TV on Monday 25 January at 15.30GMT, Tuesday 26 January at 03.30 GMT and Wednesday 27 January at 09.30 GMT.

 

Twitter Survey 2009

A big Thank You to everyone who participated in our Twitter Survey to help us make our Twitter feed more valuable for our followers.

Many of you voted to have more Twitter interviews and in general more direct access to participants at our meetings. We will work on this and try to have a good line-up of high level participants for Twitter interviews at the upcoming Annual Meeting in Davos held from 27 -31 January 2010. If the interviewee is willing we might even consider livestreaming these interviews on our Qik or Livestream channels.

One of the biggest challenges we face is how to make our Twitter feed more interactive and how to funnel questions to sessions/speakers from those who cannot attend. Can we crowdsource topics and trends in advance of our meetings and how to integrate ideas submitted on various topics in the form of blog posts or tweets?

We will definitely take these suggestions into consideration. Be assured we are listening and as often as we can we will try to answer, so feel free to fire your questions at @Davos.

As we wrote earlier we will continue to live tweet interesting speaker quotes at our upcoming forums in China, India and Davos. Live tweeting at our events inevitably means that we will go over the limit of 5 tweets a day that some have been asking for.

We will also keep on posting about upcoming events, links to our live stream, links to videos and session summaries as well as job postings. In between meetings we will try to update you on what is happening at the Forum on a daily basis. Some of you have asked us to keep the world informed and also share other non-Forum related information. We have started to do so and, who knows, maybe our Twitter feed will evolve into a more 'global exchange platform'. The most important thing as @LauraRmz pointed out is writing interesting things.

We promise we will try and keep up the good work! Thanks for your support and encouragement!

Help us Make our Twitter Stream More Valuable!

Five months ago we asked our followers how we could make our Twitter stream more valuable and we received amazing feedback. The overwhelming answer was Live Tweeting from our meetings and Twitter interviews.

 

We did live tweet from our meetings in Rio de Janeiro, Jordan, Cape Town and Seoul and even organized our first Twitter interview with Queen Rania. We plan to continue to live tweet from our upcoming summits in China, India and Davos.

 

But what else should we tweet? How can we make our Twitter stream more interesting for our readers? What would you suggest? What else do you want to hear and read from the World Economic Forum? Simply put your suggestions in the form embedded below.

New Head of Communications at the Forum

Adrian Monck, Head of Journalism and Professor of Journalism at City University London will become Managing Director, Head of Communications at the World Economic Forum. Adrian Monck, an award-winning journalist, author, commentator and social media expert, has over 20 years of experience as a journalist with CBS, ITN, and Sky News.

He has authored three books including Can You Trust the Media?. Adrian is an avid blogger (http://adrianmonck.com) but has just announced on his blog that:

"In the new role I’ll be removing my commentary hat and travelling a lot more, so the blog will probably fall into abeyance - it’s been suffering of late."

Adrian will lead the media, publications and website teams comprising of 18 staff members and oversee the Forum's numerous social media channels including this blog. Adrian can already be contacted on Twitter @amonck. Adrian Monck replaces Mark Adams who has left the Forum to become head of Communications at the IOC in Lausanne.

Forum Photos on Flickr under Creative Commons Licence

We have just uploaded 300 of our best pictures from the Annual Meeting 2009 in Davos to the World Economic Forum's Flickr account (http://tr.im/ForumPics). Admittedly it took us some time to choose the best pictures from the thousands shot by our official photographers from Swiss-Image. My colleague Dafni Kokkidi spent the past week adding descriptions, tags and geo tags to all the photos.

But it was well worth it, because these 300 high-resolution portrait shots are available for anyone to download in all sizes. Best of all, these pictures are licensed under the Creative Commons licence (BY-SA 3.0) meaning you can use them for free on your blog, on your website, in print and even for commercial purposes under the condition that you credit the World Economic Forum. We also uploaded the best pictures from our regional summits such as the recent World Economic Forum on Latin America in Rio.

Forum Wins Season Opener of Geneva Corporate Football League

The World Economic Forum's "All Blues" football team won its opening game 1:0 in the Geneva Corporate Football League - and its first competitive match in recent history - against a selection of Polo Ralph Lauren. The team around captain Yann Zopf was able to grind out a result, withstanding a strong spell of pressure by the visiting side, especially in the second half.

The "All Blues" took the lead after Jan Klawitter finished off a flowing counter-attack and punished some sloppy defending just before the half-time whistle. "I am proud that the lads showed strong team-spirit and a winning mentality for this historic victory," said Kamal Kimaoui, Trainer of the All Blues".

The next game will be on Monday, 6 April 2009 at 20:00 at Varembé against the team Louis Dreyfus. 

Forum Staff Run the Engadin Ski Marathon 2009

21 World Economic Forum employees and their spouses took part in the 41st Engadin Ski Marathon, the world's second most popular cross-country ski race through the Engadin Valley in Eastern Switzerland.

Dan Lambert and Silvia Sanchez were the fastest members of the Forum team finishing the 42.5km from Maloja to S-chanf in slightly over 3 hours. Here are the full rankings.

Matthias Lüfkens from the Forum's Communications Team live tweeted his entire run, taking pictures and shooting a video, wasting precious time in the process.

Contribute to the Davos Open Forum programme

The World Economic Forum has published the entire programme of the Open Forum 2008 in Davos. The Open Forum, co-organized by the World Economic Forum and the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches, offers a public debate on globalization and its consequences. The programme is available on a wiki-style webpage where you can comment on the sessions or post questions to be discussed by the panel.

http://www.forumblog.org/openforum/

Welcome to The Forum Weblog

Here we are, Samantha and Loic, in Warsaw, just a few hours before the opening of the European Economic Summit of the World Economic Forum in Warsaw, Poland.

Following the session (pdf) about blogging at the last World Economic Forum Summit in Davos this year and the fact that Jay, Ethan, Joi, Rebecca and myself started blogging live from Davos, the Forum team decided to start their own blog and I really like that idea. Please be nice with Samantha and myself, this is really a first attempt to make The Forum's blog a reality.

This blog is totally experimental and Samantha and myself will be blogging live during the European Economic Summit 2004.

Let us introduce ourselves briefly.

Samantha is working for The Forum as Web Editor, a blog new comer and a journalist who is "learning to write free" as she likes to put it. I am a French entrepreneur, part of the GLT community of The World Economic Forum. Please forgive my english as I am not a native english speaker.

We will blog here summaries of the sessions we participate in and some personal ideas about them. As I said, this is an experiment and should be taken as is. In no way should the notes you will find here express the voice of The Forum itself but rather our personal experience of the Summit, as participants. There is also a disclaimer here.

You are welcome to comment as you wish and trackback on this weblog, as long as you follow the guidelines written by The Forum which I think are open. We hope to start interesting discussions around the topics discussed during the European summit.