There are three moments of origin in this story. The first was the very successful mass protests at theSeattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in November, 1999. A large group of mostly U.S. protestors -an unlikely coalition of AFL-CIO trade-unionists, environmental activists, and anarchists - succeeded inscuttling the meeting. Two months later, in January, 2000 at Davos, a group of some 50 intellectuals fromaround the world tried a different tactic, organizing an "anti-Davos at Davos," seeking to get anti-neoliberalarguments a world press. And in February, 2000, two Brazilian leaders of popular movements, Chico Whitaker andOded Grajew, went to Paris to talk to Bernard Cassen, a journalist and the president of the anti-globalizationorganization called Attac-France. The two Brazilians suggested to Cassen that they join forces and launch aworld meeting that would combine mass protest and intellectual analysis. They convened this in Porto Alegre,Brazil, at the same time as the 2001 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. They called this the WorldSocial Forum, and Cassen said the object was to "sink Davos."