Is Davos an echo chamber?

Inside an echo chamber, such as a subterranean cave or an empty warehouse, voices bounce around maddeningly, overlapping each other and repeating the same things. Easy as it is to accuse Davos of being like this, it is designed and operates as the opposite. The Forum spends six months developing the Davos programme, from the emergence of the theme over the previous summer, to building the underlying thematics, and pulling together over 400 sessions whose principle is to bring together as many different people with different perspectives as possible to discuss provocative topics in order to move forward real life initiatives.

We make a major effort to involve people from across global society, to make sure that those in Davos include grassroots representatives working for social change, spiritual and artistic leaders, worker representatives, members of the Global Shapers Community, our network of global youth, technology disruptors, top level academics and experts and more.

Over 150 Davos sessions will be webcast directly to our website and other platforms. More than striving to make our activities as open and transparent as possible, the Forum invests heavily in its ability to "listen" to the voice of the global public through its digital and social media platforms. Not only during Davos but every day of the year, we are publishing ideas by people from across global society, provoking in-depth conversations online, and integrating the ideas and opinions from these exchanges into our activities. The Forum's digital media channels reach hundreds of millions of people each month.

For Davos 2017, we reached out through our social media channels for ideas and opinions from our audience all around the world, and had hundreds of responses. A number of these have been videoed and will be integrated directly into sessions, and will be used in Forum podcasts and other content. We are always looking for new ways to hear ideas from all over and integrate them into our activities. Please do get in touch if you have ideas about how to do so. Being an echo chamber would not help improve the state of the world.