The World Social Forum, begun in 2001, annually brings together several thousand people from the growing global justice movement who come to exchange, refine and propose alternative systemic practices and strategies, and inform each other about other movements from across the world that are speaking to and alongside their particular issues.  The WSF provides an open space for big ideas and proposals to be imagined and strategized.  The intention is to make it possible for people to think together on a globalized basis about the connection between local and international issues and to make room – in greater depth each year – for the creation of innovative alternatives to the dominant “common sense” of free-market culture or neoliberalism that positions the protection of capital over people.

The Forum is itself a process, whose objective is to allow for horizontal activism, for an ecology of approaches to building “another world” and to make room for a global civil society to emerge as a new political actor, autonomous of political parties or governments.

In addition to the annual global forum, the WSF has prompted the organizing of hundreds of local, regional, national social forums across the world organized under the WSF principles and methodology. The goal of these multiple, simultaneous forums is to decentralize and allow far more people to engage in the open forum atmosphere of the WSF process.  All of the various social forums in this mold include international attendees and are in no way specifically focused on the problems of a single region of country.  The first social forum in the U.S. was The Boston Social Forum in July 2004.  And in July 2007, the very first national US Social Forum will be hosted in Atlanta.