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Wish you were in Davos but didn't get an invite? Do the next best thing: participate online. The Forum is using familiar social media tools to make its proceedings more open and help the public engage with attendees. The Forum wants to shake its elitist reputation and be seen as the prime and most open forum for global discussions.

You might even end up being invited to a future Forum function. Shawn Ahmed, a 29-year-old video blogger based in Richmond Hill, Ont., was chosen last week as the winner of the 2011 Davos Debates held online and is now here at the meeting. The Forum challenged people to post a video on issues important to humanity. Ahmed's was about how corporations and charities need to bridge the "digital divide" in poor countries.

Most of the major sessions will be streamed live online or posted later on YouTube. Many sessions will take questions from the online audience. Don't like what a speaker said? Post a video saying why you think the person is wrong. If you think Davos should focus on different issues, say so.

Follow up-to-the-minute discussions on Facebook or Twitter.

So if you can't be here in body, you can certainly be here in spirit.

All press conferences and key plenary sessions will be streamed live on Livestream (http://livestream.com/worldeconomicforum). During press conferences anyone can submit questions directly to the panelists via Twitter and Facebook.

The plenary sessions will also available on demand on the Forum's YouTube channel (http://youtube.com/worldeconomicforum.)

In the run-up to the Forum, organizers ran an "Ask a Leader" challenge on YouTube, inviting the public to submit their most pressing questions. The Forum will put a selection of the top-voted questions to the world leaders in attendance.

Facebook

The Forum will conduct live interviews with selected participants that will be streamed on its Facebook page (http://facebook.com/worldeconomicforum).

In selected sessions, it will also tap into the collective wisdom of the online audience through the use of "pulses," which are quick polls on Facebook. The pulses allow the opinion of several thousand Facebook users to be captured in a matter of minutes. Their views will be fed back into the panel discussion.

Twitter

The Forum has compiled a Twitter list of 400 participants (http://twitter.com/davos/WEF2011. During the meeting, their tweets will provide insights and news. A Twitter list of journalists covering the meeting is also available on the Davos Media list (http://twitter.com/Davos/WEFmedia). The official hashtag of the Annual Meeting 2011 is #WEF.

Follow the Forum on @Davos as well as on its live tweet account @WEF where key quotes will be tweeted from public plenary sessions and where most of the Twitter chatter will happen. World Economic Forum communities are also on Twitter at: @SchwabFound @TechPioneers and @YGLVoices. Blogging

Guest posts from selected participants will be available on the World Economic Forum blog (http://www.forumblog.org). The Forum will also aggregate all media portals and partner blogs about the Annual Meeting on Netvibes (http://wef.ch/netvibes.)

World Economic Forum App

And, of course, there's an app for that. The Forum has developed an application for iPhone and Android smartphones for the general public available in the app stores. The application integrates all of the Forum's social media output - Twitter, Blog, YouTube and Flickr. Go to http://wef.ch/apps for details.

Don Tapscott (@dtapscott on Twitter) recently co-authored Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World.

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