Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
So, welcome.
I thought I'd start today by telling you a little bit about TED.
TED started about 30 years ago.
At the time it was a small shrouded conference
that happened in Southern California.
What happened in the room basically stayed in the room.
In 2002, Chris Anderson took it over
and he turned it from a for-profit to a non-for-profit conference,
whose underlying mission was "Ideas Worth Spreading".
So in 2007, we decided to take these lectures,
these 18-minute lectures that were happening at our conference,
and put them online for free.
And at that time, it was a pretty bold move
as we didn't really know what would happen.
Would be alienate our core conference audience?
And would anybody really show up to watch an 18-minute lecture online?
This was before the proliferation of video,
and we weren't sure.
And at the beginning, actually, not that many people did show up.
But we started getting emails like this:
"I'm sitting my desk at work, tears running down my face
watching Majora Carter's presentation and thinking I love this woman."
And so we realized people are connecting to these videos
in a very personal way.
And so nearly seven years later we have 1500 TED talks --
it doesn't include the TEDx talks, which we have another 30,000 --
and the TED talks have been seen over 1 billion times.
And their underlying goal
is just to spread good ideas around the world.
And so the next thing we took on
was that these talks are pretty much only in English
and so we sort of think about
how could we make the talks accessible in other languages.
And we launched the "Open Translation Project"
which is a volunteer program where volunteers translate the TED Talks.
And we have nearly 10,000 volunteer translators
working in 102 different languages,
and they've got over 45,000 translations.
And so the talks were getting out there into the world in multiple languages,
the brand was growing
and more and more people kept coming to TED and saying,
we'd love to have a TED conference in our city or our country.
And at that time we were a tiny team of about 25 to 30 people,
and so scaling a big conference around the world
wasn't really a practical solution
so we sat down to try to figure out what we could do to solve this problem.
And so Chris and I spent a summer thinking about this
and that at the end of we came up with this idea of open-sourcing TED
in what is now known as TEDx.
And I spent that summer writing some basic rules and guidelines,
and in March 2009, we hosted our first TEDx event.
It was on the University of Southern California's campus.
And really it was just an experiment,
we thought maybe, you know,
one or two other people would actually host a TEDx event,
after that.
This March is our five year anniversary
and we've had about 8896 TEDx events all over the world.
They've been held -- thank you.
(Applause)
They've been held and planned
in 161 different countries, in 50 languages,
and we estimate about 1.5 million people
have actually attended TEDx events in different countries.
We've had TEDx events in shanty communities like TEDxMathaari --
in fact we have a whole series of TEDx events in Kenya,
The Gates Foundation hosted a TEDx event in TEDxKibera,
we've had it in Kliptown in South Africa,
we've had TEDx events on a floating hotel in the middle of an Amazon forest
for 600 people to talk about sustainability,
it was a remarkable event.
This TEDx event was one of the first TEDx events
that happened in Pakistan in a all-woman's campus
and for the first time they allowed a coed event to take place,
and we've had several other TEDx events on this campus since.
We've had about 1083 university events, with another 258 planned.
We've had a TEDx event on the Great Wall of China.
For the first time, last year,
we saw a series of TEDx events happening in correctional facilities,
around the world.
And we've had TEDx events
in Kabul, Tehran, Mogadishu, Baghdad and the likes.
And what's extraordinary about these TEDx events is --
we are here today, and we take it for granted.
We just organized this event and that's not to be little --
I saw your team put a huge amount of work into this event today.
But in environments like this,
hosting a TEDx event takes a whole different set of challenges.
And TEDx organizers have been threatened, their families and been threatened,
permits are hard to get, TEDx events have been shut down when the TEDx event
actually does happen it is absolutely extraordinary for the community
because it gives them a safe place to talk about ideas
and to be innovative and to take action
and it creates the space in these communities
that they didn't generally have.
And so I want to share this quick quote that sort of epitomizes this:
"I am sitting at the end of the world,
the nearest small town over 600 km away,
huge oil fields surrounded by massive dunes,
nothing else,
with the head of the world's largest oil company
and his hot shot team [...] coed.
And what has most impacted these young Saudis,
in the past few weeks?
Not Japan, or the turmoil next door but TEDxRiyadh and Jeddah.
It's what everyone is talking about,
it's the [trending] topic on Twitter and Facebook.
In a place that is rapidly opening up you are leading."
And so it is this extraordinary community of TEDx organizers around the world.
And they all believe deeply in the power of ideas to change the world.
And they share this common DNA, and I say this often.
They -- I feel they often have more in common with each other
than they sometimes do with their next-door neighbor
or relative down the road.
They believe deeply in collaboration versus competition,
they hold workshops and other events all over the world.
They believe in the cross-cultural exchange of ideas --
many TEDx events, like this TEDx event today,
livestreams out to the broader community:
this was TEDxRamallah,
that livestreamed into Israel and four other Arab countries.
And they truly believe in this community of people
and the possibility of our global community of people
who respect other people's ideas and culture.
And they embrace this model of radical openness.
And so I wanted to play this quick video
that really gives you a sense of who these extraordinary people are
and who are organizing these TEDx events all over the world.
(Video)
We had no idea what this would become.
[TEDx Stories From The Field]
We really wanted to focus on turning ideas into action
and how democratization of innovation is really enabling anyone to take part,
turning those ideas into action.
For TEDxOhioStateUniversity,
they livestreamed down into the prison on the one computer that had Internet.
They put it onto the wall,
and inmates got around, and they watched it.
And then the inmates said, we can do this.
The men play in this event --
we have 17 speakers and performers,
all speaking on social justice in the incarceration system.
Half of them were inmates, half of them were outside guests.
The day was based off of this concept,
this is a place to grow and to learn and to challenge yourself.
I look upon busloads of school children
being driven towards dreams, thought to be unattainable --
sights and sounds of the ghetto.
I wanted to take TEDx to a school in the slum called Parikrma.
I really wanted to have TEDx be a tool
by which the kids actually learn to do everything themselves,
from designing the stage to approving the speakers.
It was very empowering.
That has fitted with what I wanted the kids to learn.
For me, TEDx is about amplifying the impact of others.
We had a speaker named Ken Fernandez Prada
and he actually escaped Colombia as a child
and his dream was to work
for a healthcare company like Johnson & Johnson
so that he could help improve health care conditions back in his home.
We gave him the opportunity to present on the TEDxJNJ stage,
he talked about this telemedicine idea that he had.
Well, based on that even
he connected with someone of our ortho clinical businesses
and they're now actually doing that project in Colombia.
In the last event, one of my speakers was chosen to be on ted.com.
He's a graphic designer
that created this project called "Israel loves Iran",
and it went totally viral.
Iranians created a group called "Iran loves Israel"
and there was "Palestine loves Israel"
and "Israel loves Palestine" and "Germany loves Palestine".
And it just blew up --
to give a platform for this guy's message was something really phenomenal.
Shamila Kohistani, she had the courage
to start the first women's soccer team in Afghanistan.
I wanted to show the world the other side of Afghanistan,
the brave woman of Afghanistan who are making history
despite the challenges that they are facing in daily life.
After TEDxWomen, she's now working at the UN,
advocating for girls just like her
all around the world.
I.O. Tillett, who gave a really shocking and surprising talk on transgender,
connected with a young Afghan woman
who was talking about going up under the Taliban
and established a girls school.
And she and I.O. connected at the TEDWomen conference
as she invited her to come to Kabul to talk about transgender.
And they cobbled a classroom of girls.
The whole concept of that just explodes every possible boundary.
TEDx is this "from the ground up" organization
of people coming together to create more of the world that they want to live in.
If I can look back ten years, and say, oh, that was because of TEDx,
that'll be a good contribution.
(Video ends)
(Applause)
So being here today, you join this extraordinary group of woman --
I mean with people around the world
who are committed to changing the world through ideas.
And so I want to say, be brave, be bold and stand up for what you believe in.
And in closing,
I just want to say a huge thank you.
So many TEDx organizers came together to organize this event today,
so thank you -- I saw in your team.
I can't mention everybody by name, but thank you.
(Applause)