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Last year, I had expressed my disappointment with the Davos Debates. Not because I lost – but because of the manner in which the winner was selected. It seemed arbitrary, done behind closed doors, and completely undemocratic.

With this year’s winner being selected by popular vote, does this make this year’s Davos Debates nothing more than a mere popularity contest? Not at all – and I mean that even if I lose by a landslide.

The Davos Debates would have been a popularity contest if voting was the only method of selecting a candidate. In that case, it would make a lot of sense for any of those big YouTube mega-stars to submit a video (it could even be unrelated to Davos) and win by a landslide. Free trip to Davos!

But, what I like about this year is that it combines an evaluation of ideas and a way to prove a candidates campaign & rallying ability. The first round was all about ideas. The judges didn’t care if you have 1, 100, or 1 million YouTube subscribers.

How do I know this? Because the panel of judges were as independent as you can get. You have Nobel Peace Prize winner Professor Muhammad Yunus, UN Peace Ambassador Paulo Coelho, and Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington.

Just to give you an idea of how impartial these panel of judges were: the head of a US-based charity that partners with the Professor Yunus’s Grameen Bank also submitted a video the Davos Debates. He was not selected as a finalist.

The second round, is all about a candidate’s ability to rally support for their cause. I like because it combines the best of last year’s contest (the search and selection of good ideas) with the idea of transparency and opening up the selection process to the people.

The way it is setup now, whoever gets to speak at Davos can say “I have an important message and I have a lot of people who want you to hear it”. It gives much needed weight that have been missing in previous iterations of the Davos Debates.

The only trouble now is getting there.

In January of 2007, I withdrew from grad school at the University of Notre Dame and began an unemployed, unplanned, and “uncultured” journey to help the poor.

Almost exactly three years later, that journey has brought me to within grasp of being able to talk to world leaders about global poverty at one of the planet’s most important conferences. I can get there – but only with your help.

Out of 75 applications from around the world (and many more that didn’t make the deadline), I was selected as one of five potential candidates to go to Davos. The winner, is determined by you – because it’s your vote that determines the winner.

I won’t lie. I’m up against some brilliant people. I wish we could all go – because I’d love to meet them all and brainstorm. At the same time, I know that it’s not like global poverty can be solved with a one week trip to Switzerland.

But this could be big. It’s the biggest thing to ever happen in my life and it could be the biggest thing for the future of this project. So, if you’d like to help, here’s how you can do so:

Things you will need [REVISED as of Jan 11th, 2010]:

1. A YouTube or Google account. Signing up for either is free. UPDATE: You don’t need to signup for anything to vote.
2. An internet connection good enough to use YouTube.
3. The ability to get online every 24 hours until January 15th.
4. If Possible: Friends & family who might be interested in voting as well.

Here’s how you can vote:

1. Go to http://YouTube.com/Davos

2. On the top half of the page, you will see something about the Davos Debates. It will have three tabs. Click on “vote”.

3. You will see five videos from the five candidates. Select my video called “A Message to Davos” – the thumbnail is my picture.

Videos Are Randomly Sorted and May Not Appeared In This Order

4. Once the video starts playing, click the green thumbs-up button. Wait a few seconds. Your vote has been placed.

When The Red Thumbs Down Turns Grey, Your Vote Has Been Cast.

5. You can vote again everyday.

It may seem that, with so many followers on Twitter and so many subscribers, this is all but guaranteed. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Without getting too academic, it boils down to public vs. private networks. My support network is very public. And, like every network, not everyone following me or subscribed will be reading my tweets, watching the videos, or reading this blog.

It’s very possible (and very likely) that many of these candidates have a group of friends, family, and colleagues who will be diligently voting. This could be close.

Every. Vote. Counts.

(Photo Seen in Featured Content is from Flickr)

I really thought I was going to be witnessing history with this YouTube/Davos partnership. What I feel we got instead was a missed opportunity.

I was kind expecting – or at least hoping – that when YouTube partnered with the World Economic Forum at Davos, they would be doing the same kind of thing that YouTube did with the Presidential debates. At the CNN YouTube Debates, the Democratic and Republican Presidential candidates were asked questions submitted by the YouTube community. The candidates would listen to the question and then respond. CNN even flew a few of those YouTubers down to the debates so that they would have an opportunity to make a follow-up question or comment. Even if the debate didn’t move beyond canned responses – at least there was citizen interaction.

That I believe was what was missing with YouTube and the Davos Question.

First, since those submitting videos were asked to keep their videos under 3 minutes, I kind of assumed that meant there would be a 10 to 30 minute screening of the best videos for world leaders to see. What happened instead, was that a handful of videos were cut into a two minute montage sequence. As you can see here, half of that montage sequence was devoted to restating the original Davos Question (“What can we do in 2008?”, “Hello Davos!”, “Wow, that’s a big question. Big big question”, etc.,.). The remaining minute was just a quick laundry list of requests and ideas (lower poverty! more renewable energy! invest in kids!). What could have been the opportunity for powerful ideas and discussions to emerge ended up looking more like a wish list to Santa Claus.

Second, just like regular YouTube users submitted their answer to the Davos Question, world leaders, celebrities, businessmen, and future youth leaders were able to record what they’re take was on the question. But, for the most part, this was nothing new. Bono, of course, asked us to support the Millennium Development Goals. The executive director for UNICEF made a similar plea. There were a few surprises of course. It was good to see youth leaders like Whitney and Juan there with some good ideas. I was a bit surprised that most important issue the Director of the American Center for Disease Control chose to raise was “Exercise!”. What was absent, however, was any evidence of interaction with the community.

I was really hoping that the world leaders at Davos would be watching some of the videos and then commenting and responding. Ideally, it would have been nice if these leaders would have gone back to YouTube later to check and see what the response to their videos were. They called this “The Davos Conversation” but it didn’t feel much different than watching an interview on TV. There were a few exceptions, the US Director of Education decided to voice her agreement to a video by a YouTuber pleading for greater investment in children. And Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, decided to respond to a question raised by a YouTuber about Google’s potential to help in electronic voting.

If The Uncultured Project has taught me anything it’s that, if you are not satisfied with the way things are being done – you have to offer your own solution instead of critiquing others. This is where the World Social Forum can come in….

Why can’t the World Social Forum take the same technology (YouTube) and use it to the full potential the the folks at Davos did not?

I maybe in Bangladesh right now – but my mind’s on the World Economic Forum happening right now in Davos, Switzerland. For the first time in the forum’s existence, we really get to know more about the thoughts and views of those attending the World Economic Forum. This is because YouTube has teamed up with the folks at Davos. All of a sudden, Davos has helped turn Bono and Henry Kissinger into video bloggers. This is also the opportunity where people like you and me can get our voices heard at Davos. It’s called The Davos Conversation. It’s a huge step forward in democratizing one of the world’s most important forums.

One thing that surprised me is that I’m finding a lot of kindred spirits at Davos. Bono was there and, of course, he spoke in favor of the Millenium Development Goals that I’ve been talking about earlier. In fact, Bono writes the foreword of Dr. Sachs book “The End of Poverty”. The Executive Director of UNICEF was there and made a similar endorsement as well for the MDGs. But it’s not just celebrities and big wigs that were there making a difference – people from my generation were there too and were making their mark. Take Whitney and Juan for example:

Whitney makes a good point by pointing out that every year, Americans spend $20 billion dollars on ice cream. It only takes half of that to give a full education to every poor person on the face of this planet. It’s facts like this that actually made me a sociologist. My first ever class in sociology was at the University of Toronto. A professor there, by the name of Robert Brym, made a moving lecture which changed the course of my life forever. In a few charts and graphs and a few phrases – he impressed upon me two things: how easy it is to understand some of the world’s biggest problems and how simple it is to fix it…. if we really wanted to.

I also relate to Juan’s point about how we can’t expect our governments to solve all our problems. Politics is a nasty business. Too many politicians promise change but deliver the status quo. Do we simply elect the wrong people? Or is something about the nature of politics that makes it hard for true change to emerge? Don’t get me wrong – if governments could agree to fund the completion of the MDGs, that would be a surefire way to end poverty in our lifetime. It’s just that, change doesn’t come that often in politics. So we need a Plan B – a way to reach that goal through ordinary citizens like you and me.

It would also be nice to have a Plan C – but I have no idea what that would be…