The World Social Forum, an annual meeting bringing together activists and leftist intellectuals from around the world, runs from August 9 to August 14.The gathering, which was first introduced in 2001, serves as an annual counterweight to the World Economic Forum, held in Davos, Switzerland. The Montreal WSF event is expected to draw 50,000 people and 5,000 organizations and is aimed at finding "concrete alternatives to the neoliberal economic model and to policies based on the exploitation of human beings and nature," according to its website.