It’s a packed agenda at Davos. So what does this elite multistakeholder gathering tell us of what leaders are thinking about? Its impossible to go to everything on the schedule, so I put the agenda through Wordle to get a sense of the topics. Unfortunately the word “Occupy” only appeared once, so didnt make it to the word cloud.
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What do you think? Something important missing from the agenda?
The content doesnt indicate the level of interest in the topics; and some sessions are so full I missed the sign up. A session on the art and science of happiness filled up super fast, yet the mental health session still languishes with single figure sign ups. Yet might our collective insanity be the one unifying thing we can start working on to create a better world? Or are we just too busy getting on getting on? I rest my case.
Later on I’ll do another word cloud, excluding the procedural words, to reveal some key themes. But now, time to run madly to the next session…
Professor Jem Bendell 
Intriguing results of the tag cloud—and a great beginning of a content analysis of the WEF. The majority of the terms in this cloud are “actors”, ie. nouns. What is clearly lacking are verbs—or the “actions” of the actors…..thus “occupy” with only one example is clearly not part of the current vocabulary of the current WEF “reality”….
Thanks for posting this—it’s very telling….and perhaps this is indicative of the event as a “social construct” with the focus on the people, groups and institutions meeting and not as much on what they are actually doing?
Interesting! I might have missed them, but I haven’t found either education or dialogue.
Hello LIlly, interesting perception. I think that in looking at the tag cloud we need to differentiate nouns, that is “actors” from verbs and “action”. If you look closely there are alot of “actors” (nouns) related to eduction—ie. “University”, “Professor”, etc. I think there is a lot of eductional “influence”, ie. in the form of new knowledge, as research and policy. I would assume that there IS an “educational institutional” influence on the Forum. Whether there is sharing, learning, exchange and ACTION with respect to those institutions is the issue, and there, yes, I agree with you, there are very few “education” verbs. Thus, there may not be much focus on the process (action) of learning—but more on the passive exchange of words….
Let’s see what ACTION terms come out of the final materials (the “artifacts” that will be produced at the Forum”).
I look forward to continuing the “exploration” of the ACTION initiatives that emerge from the Forum.
best, Jerri
The cloud processing needs some tweaking.
Economics
economics
economic
appear as separate words.
Why is ‘global’ so huge and ‘local’ absent. Shouldn’t our economic attention be on both?