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Hacking Cities for Social Good: Bay Area Shapes Davos for Second Consecutive Year

Today, the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Palo Alto and San Francisco Hubs are proud to announce that the Bay Area has been selected as one of 20 locations globally to remotely contribute to the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos!

This forms part of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Shaping Davos initiative, a game-changing global dialogue to bring the world to the WEF’s Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters (January 13-29, 2015), and in turn, bring the Davos Annual Meeting to the world. These events feed and extend the conversations going on in Davos to shape local, regional, industry and global agendas.

This is the second consecutive year that Shaping Davos is held at Stanford University. As part of this landmark initiative, on January 20-28, “Hacking Cities for Social Good” is the title of a series of multi-disciplinary, collective brainstorming sessions bringing together top professionals from Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area around the topic.

Participants have been taking part in a human-centered design workshop, especially designed to address the challenges faced by four startups and non-profit organizations that use technology and social innovation to (re)connect communities. Together, the group is applying basic elements of the design thinking process to explore potential solutions to the issues.

After a rigorous nomination and selection process, the organizations represented in the evening’s activities include: Miracle Messages, Wishbone, ArtsUp, and MCrowdsourcing Canada Inc. (MC2), which are led by Global Shapers and other innovators whose work is geared towards creating social good.

The event will be summarized in a short video produced by the team, as well as online and print media coverage.