I've stumbled upon an event happening next week called Future Summit 2009 which is run by an organisation that calls itself The Australian Davos Connection. This body describes itself as;
While ADC was originally founded in 1996 to: (a) promote the World Economic Forum (WEF) within Australia; (b) promote Australia's interest within the broader WEF community; and (c) share the richness of ideas within the WEF community to a wider Australian audience; the organisation's charter has since expanded to include the broader aims of:
* Promoting business excellence by encouraging policy debate on global issues;
* Improving the quality of leadership;
* Enhancing Australia's position in the region and the world;
* Encouraging Australian leaders to help improve the quality of life of all Australians;
* Encouraging Australia to play a responsible, and leadership role where appropriate, within the global community; and
* Exposing Australian leaders to international experts and key international leaders.
The interesting part is that the group doesn't seem to have a formal tie to The World Economic Forum. While the Chair in his newsletter talks about his recent visit to Davos, there is nothing on the ADC site nor the WEF site specifically referring to any formalised link.
So we then focus on the idea of the "Future Summit". It has an interesting draft program and list of speakers but they are not presented so that one can be related to the other.
It is really hard to give the event much credibility. The whole exercise looks a bit like a "big end of town" event - not just corporate Australia, but super-corporate Australia.
We need less of these kinds of events, not more.
1 comment:
Hi David,
Thanks for the post. I work for the Australian Davos Connection and thought I would stop in and let you know a little bit more about us.
We were founded in 1996 by a group of Australians who had been participants in the World Economic Forum in Davos that year. These people decided to start ADC largely because they felt the type of conversations that took place at Davos each year was lacking in Australia at the time.
Fast-forward 13 years and whilst we are still not officially aligned with the WEF and many of the founding members have moved on, we now collaborate with the guys at the WEF to organise our Australian Leadership Retreat together.
I think we've been successful in helping to spark good debate, dialogue and inquisitiveness amongst many Australians in that time.
This year, we will be blogging and using twitter to connect more with people who are not at the event and hopefully this will help continue to further colour the conversations we have been having with different thinking and ideas. You can join along by visiting www.futuresummit.org/blog if you're interested.
Cheers David,
Steve Hopkins - ADC Community Manager
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