Since January 2001, the World Social Forum has been Brazilian (several times, in Porto Alegre), Indian (once, in Mumbai), polycentric (Caracas, Bamako, and Karachi) and has gathered hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world to expose and share alternative ways of thinking and acting.
This year, the WSF is the reflection of the shape being taken all over the world for resistance and movements for change. Rather than attempting to gather into one, worldwide mass celebration, it is breaking up into what we, at the Alliance, call unity in diversity. Indeed, thanks among others to the Internet, small human-sized local movements are cropping up across the planet locally and connecting through regional, national, and global alliances. The expectation is that the increased aggregate and common awareness will soon reach the critical mass needed to inflect and finally annul the current dominant destructive course of human activity imposed upon the world by a super-privileged and super-powerful global minority.
The WSF 2008 has donned the colors of a Global Call for Action in the week culminating on January 26, the same week during which the so-called Davos summit [1] holds its annual meeting.
The idea is that this year’s WSF activities will be self-organized locally, all at the same time. The Call is promoted by all the organizations and movements at the global, national, and local levels that refer to the WSF Charter of Principles. If you have an activity to propose or simply wish to join one in your immediate area, go the the WSF 2008 Web site. Here, you will see immediately where actions are taking place in the world (and where nothing at all is planned!). Among other useful Internet tools, the Web site offers browsing via a "tag cloud," in which the keywords self-assigned in every language to the various activities grow bigger as a function of their use. And what are the main keywords today? Ética ambiental, água, Action, Cultura, human rights, peace, social forum, vídeo .
The WSF is not an event, but an ongoing process growing stronger by the year. Hey, and this year you can actually afford to go the World Social Forum! Why would you miss such a great opportunity?
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