EDITORIAL: Ralph Talmont – Who is this guy Ted?

You asked, so here it is. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design and these were the original “subjects” for what twenty five years ago began as a conference which looked at the impending confluence in these three areas. This confluence is now a fact of life and the original organiser of the conference, American architect and designer Richard Saul Wurman has moved on to other projects. Several incarnations later, TED is a global community, still centered around conferences which take place in the US, UK and, recently, in India but which now includes hundreds of thousands of people who are excited about ideas worth spreading.

The foundation which runs the conferences and curates the main website, ted.com, has released what is both an incredibly clever way of broadening the reach of the TED brand and a method of liberating latent creative energy of the intelligent masses. They call it TEDx, a series of TED-like events around the world, independently organised by teams of passionates in each location. The locations so far have been as diverse as the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, Kibera – the largest urban slum in Africa, in Nairobi, and Shekhawati, a rural area in Rajasthan (where they had to find and bring in hundreds of extra chairs since the crowd just kept getting bigger.)

Banjamin Zander, an orchestra director who spoke at TED recently, has said that TED is about releasing power. We have already witnessed this in the course of organising our event – bright people naturally gravitate towards other bright people, fueled by the excitement of finding new possibilities and opening doors to rich personal connections with people one would not usually meet.

Other than the high quality, concentrated talks given by people accomplished in a whole range of disciplines, the most exciting thing about these gatherings are the compelling conversations they engender – indeed, one of the guiding principles of the TED community is that it should be a space where spontaneous conversations can take place, inspired by the content of the talks. At TEDxWarsaw we are very much following this ethos of allowing a wave of excitement to build and cary the participants into places where they may not have ordinarily gone.

We have curated a very diverse group of speakers for this inaugural event, some of them well known nationally and beyond the borders of this country, others known only within their disciplines. All of them share a passion for their work and are given to exploring paths which can serve as inspiration to others. From scientists to social entrepreneurs and from accomplished musicians to business leaders, we have over twenty passionate, deep, human beings ready to share their stories and their ideas. This is not going to be like any other conference you have been to.

Most conferences are vertical, concentrating on a tightly defined professional interest, business discipline, academic subject, etc. The very nature of TED, and by extension of TEDx, is horizontal. So instead of seeing one biologist talking to five hundred other biologists, you are likely to enter a circle where a biologist will be talking to an internet entrepreneur, a marketing expert and a tribal storyteller, and exactly where their ideas and their conversation will take them is anyone’s guess. What’s certain is they all will be passionate about what they’re doing and will be happy to share their specific knowledge with a hope of finding general inspiration.

-RT