is presented by Mashable's Davos coverage is presented by BMW i , a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment.







Our final day at Davos found the Mashable team standing feet away from black-clad riot police, a row of armored vans blocking our path and the chanting of slogans all around. We'd stumbled into the middle of a protest by Occupy WEF, a movement co-ordinated on social networks that took its inspiration from other "Occupy" movements around the globe. Their message: The world needs to listen to the 99%, not just the 1%.

Although the standoff soon diffused, it seemed — ironically, perhaps — to echo some of the issues being discussed inside the Davos Congress Center where the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting was being held.

Technology was the common thread running through many of the conversations at Davos — from whether technological advances create or destroy jobs, to why U.S. tech firms outsource their manufacturing to China.

And yet it was this issue of changing power structures — from the Arab Spring, to the Occupy Wall Street movement, to the SOPA backlash the previous week — that stuck out in my mind. The invite-only conference in which world leaders supposedly gather to discuss solutions to global problems was increasingly paying heed to groups that seem to thrive without hierarchies: Distributed movements coordinated through social media, cellphones and text messaging.

Was Davos nearing death, or simply being disrupted?

"Power Finally Belongs to the People"

Mashable had chosen as its home base the Molkerei Davos, a creamery and tourist attraction where we hosted video interviews in partnership with the document-hosting service Scribd.

In an early interview on our stage, best-selling author Paulo Coelho set the tone for many of our subsequent discussions. "We, normal people, are empowered much more than governments", Coelho told New York Times writer Nick Bilton. "Governments, they can control a few things," he continued, "but today the power finally belongs to the people."

Coelho cited the 2009 Iranian election protests as the catalyst for subsequent online movements. "It starts with Iran, back to the Green Revolution," he told Bilton, "I saw a friend of mine in this video that you see on YouTube, when a girl is killed. And there's someone that approaches the girl, and it was a friend of mine. That video was the symbol. Neda is her name ... And I start tweeting, and at the end of the day I managed to get my friend out of Iran using Twitter and Facebook."

Beyond SOPA: "Some of These Issues Are Actually Incredibly Boring"

While these social movements are echoed in the U.S. by Occupy Wall Street, they appear to have reached a new level of visibility in recent weeks due to a successful web-based uprising against the Stop Online Piracy Act. The Wikipedia community saw the bill as a threat to Internet freedoms and agreed to "black out" the online encyclopedia for a day, following in the footsteps of Reddit. Multiple website shutdowns, in combination with an unprecedented scale of protests on social networks, effectively killed the bill.

On our SOPA panel at Davos, I asked Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales whether such web-based uprisings were a new trend. Wales replied: "We've seen the Arab Spring, I guess we could call this the Hollywood Spring, and I think there should be a lot more springs."

Asked where this web-based movement might direct its efforts in the future, Wales explained that the new challenge is tackling the secrecy under which new legislation — such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement — is created.

"There's something fundamentally wrong with the way these agreements are put into place that is undemocratic, that is counter to the overwhelming spirit of the age. Ask Mubarak in Egypt, right? People are demanding to be heard. We want openness, transparency, we want a dialog, a discussion, a real genuine debate."

But Wales expressed concern that the web community will become engaged in political issues that lack a sense of urgency: "I think some of the challenges we have are that some of these issues are actually incredibly boring," he explained.

The End of Leadership?

These movements look set to upturn the corporate world, too. David Jones, global CEO at the communications group Havas and author of Who Cares Wins, told me during our Davos interview that social networks are putting pressure on corporations to act in the best interests of the public.

"We've seen that the leadership we've had in the world, be it in the political space or in the business space, hasn't exactly been that responsible ... If you today are the leader of a country or a major business, and you do not behave in the right way, people have been empowered through social media to take you down. So whether you're the CEO of BP or of News International, whether you're the head of an Arab Spring country, whether you're a misbehaving footballer or fashion designer, people now have the ability to actually undermine you or remove you if you behave in the wrong way." "Twenty, 30 years ago, if you believed in something, actually demonstrating that was quite an uncomfortable and dangerous process — you'd have to go out, join a march et cetera. Today, one click on Facebook and you can demonstrate your support and power. If you look at what Wael Ghonim and his guys did around Egypt and the Arab Spring ... those movements started on Facebook. And I think every single individual has been empowered to create a mass movement."

Does the future of power involve governments and corporations being run by leaderless groups on social networks?, I wondered. Are conferences like Davos about to become extinct? I asked Jones for his thoughts.

"The thing we've seen with the Arab Spring, and to a degree with Occupy, is that social media has created the ability to create these mass movements, but it doesn't actually create leaders. I think the world still needs leaders and the world still needs leadership. Those leaders, however, need to understand new rules. The rules of social media are the same as the rules of running a business, are the same as the new rules of running a country. It's all about transparency, authenticity and speed ... The old world of command and control is gone." "I think it was Gandhi who said, There go my people: I have to go and run and catch up."

#OccupyWEF Protestors in Davos, Switzerland

Jimmy Wales image courtesy of Flickr, via Joi

Documented@Davos

Mashable is working with Scribd on a program called Documented@Davos, where we’ll be interviewing young leaders, technology pioneers and forward-thinking organizations to share the important issues being discussed at Davos with everyone online. You can follow along with the hashtag #DavosDocs.

Here's the lineup of leaders who will be interviewed for Documented@Davos:







Coverage presented by BMW i

Mashable's Davos coverage is presented by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment.