Another World Is Possible was the title of the II World Social Forum held on 1-5 February in Brazil. It was hard to disagree with it being among fifty thousand participants from different parts of the world who marched along the streets of Porto Alegre playing musical instruments, dancing, singing, shouting slogans, laughing, arguing and waving banners. They all were united by the desire to find better ways of social organisation, the necessity of which was proved by the events taking place quite near, over the border, where the Argentinean economy and the government were in the state of collapse caused by the debt crisis.

According to the report of the Alternatives Committee of the International Forum on Globalisation, in a world where a few are excessively rich, 200 million children under 5 do not have enough food, every year 14 million children die from hunger-related diseases, 100 million children are living on the streets, 8 million people go to bed hungry every night. In the places where globalists see the spread of democracy and market economy, citizen movements see how the power in society moves away from citizens and communities to financial speculators and trans-national corporations pursuing short-term profit, the democracies of people are replaced with the democracies of money, and a diversity of ethnic cultures - with the culture of materialism.

The First (2001) and the Second (2002) World Social Forums in Porto Alegre are an attempt to find an alternative to the world where trans-national companies operate at the level of global market ignoring civil society's interference, a desire to give impulse to the process of creating public consensus regarding the world acceptable for everyone. The World Social Forum is not an event but a process, space created for the civil society by the civil society itself, which expresses citizen movements' hopes, diversity, failures, search and ideas concerning the process of globalisation and rapidly growing citizen exclusion. So, the only way to respond to neo-liberal globalisation is, according to Boaventura dos Santos, "other" globalisation, creation of another world based on democratic diversity of ideas.

Building a viable alternative to the world governed by the globalisation process is a huge task in terms of its complexity and scope. The same features were characteristic of the Forum programme -800 workshops, 150 seminars, over 50 conferences and testimonies with 3000 speakers from 48 countries. The total number of participants was 51 thousand people representing 5 thousand organisations from 131 countries of the world. The Forum's true star was American scholar and public figure Noam Chomsky. About 4.5 thousand people came to listen to his speech, even the conference hall could not seat all those who wished to be present.

It is interesting that the Forum was also taking place outside conference-halls and university rooms. There functioned the so-called cultural workshops where one could not only watch but also learn songs, dances and sports of different peoples of the world.

The main themes of the Forum around which the discussions, exchange of opinions and experience took place, were: Wealth an Social Reproduction; Access to Wealth and Sustainability; Affirmation of Civil Society and Public Spaces; Political and Ethnical Power in the new Society.

Unfortunately, the Forum was not properly covered by mass media. But it is probably not surprising that it attracted much less attention of the press than the World Economic Forum, which took place in New York at the same time. Southern Brasilia is too far from the world media centres. It is far from the Eastern Europe too. Maybe, therefore representatives of this region were not numerous either. Although, thanks to the International Council on Adult Education, at one of the workshops there was a chance to tell the audience about democratic transformations in Ukraine, their positive and negative consequences, reform of the education system and development of education for democracy, work with teachers, as well as the Education for Democracy in Ukraine Project's contribution in the establishment of civic education system.

There were not many representatives from Northern Europe either, though the delegations of France, Italy and Spain were quite numerous.

One more interesting feature of the Forum was the policy of its organisers with regards to its final document. As the Forum was an informal event, it was decided to refuse from any final document (communique or declaration), any mechanism of assessment of the Forum's achievements and failures. One can disagree with such a position, as any event requires conclusions and analysis of the work performed at least to outline future perspective. However, the aim of the article is to evaluate the Forum but to inform the readers about this significant event, which didn't get the attention of the press. As to its evaluation, we will agree with Alan Tucket, Head of the National Organisation for Adult Learning (England) who assessed his participation in the Forum as follows: "The Forum was the largest adult learning event I have participated in - but there was little paperwork; there were open and permissive arrangements for participation. No one inspected - but there were lots of people to get advice from. I might find it hard to elaborate precise learning outcomes from my trip… yet everyone I spoke to was inspired by the richness of the experience and the challenge of the agenda".

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