Transcript

TEDxTelAviv - Bruno Giussani - Ideas About Spreading Ideas

[Music] how do ideas spread how do for example the ideas of some of those people here spread they are all very accomplished insightful thinkers and doers they're all people that if you had to meet them uh they probably inspire you and maybe change a bit the way you look at the world there are people who have reached Millions uh online particularly online and not only uh and so the question is really how do their ideas and how in general ideas spread and that's the question the core of what we try to do at uh at Ted uh we are of course organize conferences T enter Global in particular uh we onun the website that uh you uh most of you certainly know and we also use a series of other uh tools and channels a fellowship a price uh social networking sites and of course to help ideas spread and uh it's really about building a a platform and a mechanism for this for people to share ideas and for ideas to travel uh far and in the process of doing this you have learned a few things and also taken some steps uh and I would like to share three of them with you today uh three mechanisms for making it easier for ideas to travel far and the first of course is about access and it's about lowering the barrier to access for us this barrier was particularly language if you went to a Ted website 15 months ago it said riveting Talks by remarkable people free to the world and the talks were there and they were free but they were not exacted to the world because they were all only in English and now as lead said you go there and you find an additional entry in the menu click on translations and you get a list of more than 70 languages in 15 months in all of those languages there is at least one very often dozens and even more often hundreds of talks with subtitles so you pick Hebrew and uh you go to a list of the 220 something talks that are available you select one and uh you get to a talk that's subtitled in Hebrew by the way one of the two translators here is the one who's in the room and uh uh and this is a way to low the barrier to access if somebody doesn't speak English well enough to listen to In this case Brian Cox physicist uh they can still watch the video and get uh the translation the subtitles not only if you click on this link a full transcript opens up which means that if you are in a region where there is not enough bandwitdh totally indexable by Bing and Google and all the other so it's easy to find it's searchable uh and those are all mechanisms by which you can lower the barriers to access these great speakers and these great ideas for anyone around the world with an internet uh connection uh how do we do this uh Le has mentioned it before uh we do it basically by calling out on the T Community all the translations are done by volunteer translators there is a mechanism in place for quality control but it's all the work and it all rest is on the shoulders of the uh Ted Community all we do is really we create a framework and a structure to make this uh uh happen and there are thousands of volunteer translations translators working on this uh right now and more than 6,500 subtitles already active on the site so mechanism number one lowering the barrier to access the second one is how can we create spaces for people to engage with the to do something with them we do our conferences we put 50 speakers on stage they each come up with great ideas and then what and then people get inspired by them and want to act behind them and for some of them we actually help structure that inspiration and that action we create spaces for engagement that's for us the thir price the thir price is given once a year to individuals remarkable individuals based on their past achievements and also based on uh their future vision uh and they get two things they get some money $100,000 and they get to come to Ted give a speech and express a wish what we call a Ted priz wish basically telling people in the room and whoever watches the video afterwards I wish to do this help me make it happen uh the winner of this year was Jimmy Oliver uh the British cook uh it's too new as a as a wish only two months ago to really go into details because of course it's about food quality food awareness for Children and Families uh and fighting obesity but just to give you an example of a couple of examples of how the T prize Works how do you uh create spaces for people to engage with some of these ideas and Visions uh Neil Turok won the prize a couple of years ago he's a physicist from the UK and His Wish was help me take a model of a very successful school for mathematically gifted African kids in Cape Town and replicated across a dozen different African countries and many people from the T Community stood up and said I am interested in this and helped him and two of those schools are already open today and others are in the pipeline uh Karen Armstrong is a religious scholar from Britain and uh her wish was help me draft and then disseminate a charter for compassion a document written by representatives of all the major religions including a three abrahamic religions at the highest level that would define what is the common ground among the religions instead of always talking about what divides us let's look at what unites us at where is our Common Ground compassion and the charter was drafted uh and it was with input of thousands of people from around the world and a committee of uh of Representatives of the major religions and uh uh it was it was released uh last November and it's traveling around the world in many different uh ways uh and this is uh uh Sylvia Earl's Tad wish Sylvia Earl is an American oceanographer probably the utmost American oceanography she came to T February 2009 she said You know guys the oceans are really dying they are not in good shape pollution over fishing acidification I wish that you help me to create raise awareness and then put in place a campaign to create Marin protected areas numerous enough and big enough to reverse those Trends basically I wish that you help me save the oceans not exactly a tiny tiny project right uh but that the T Community has many ways of of working uh and uh that's taken about a year to get all the resources and engagements that people offered uh for this this Vision to come together uh and the first step was uh taken two weeks ago when uh T conference took place at the Galapagos it was at the same time a conference and a brainstorming on which are the priority projects to be launched they will hear a lot about Mission blue uh in the coming weeks as we start now publishing the speeches that were uh given there and starting the campaign so this as well like the translation project rests on the shoulders and the passion and engagement of the Ted Community we only play there a catalytic role and an organizing role uh everybody can line up behind any of these projects and say you know I am a web designer I want to I offer to design your website and others say I'm a billionaire philanthropist and uh you know my whole organization is at your disposal and everything in between and we just help structuring coordinating uh this kind of Engagement from the broader Ted community so lower the body to access creates spaces for engagement and then the third point is democratize the ideas and this is tedx so which your part of today t x for us is a way to answer a question the question is why don't you T come to Tel Aviv or qual lur or Moscow and do a Ted event here and we can't just multiply the Ted conferences but now we can answer well you can do it like Shimon and Maya and Lead did here you can come and ask for a license the license is totally free we are not in it for money we don't get any money out of this the license free uh you need only to agree to stick to a dozen ground rules and once you do that just to make sure that is the Ted format and the Ted approach selecting speakers and it had details and and atmosphere in the room uh once you get the license then you go off and do your event uh and uh when we started this uh we thought we will have 20 or 30 events in the first year and this was one year and two weeks ago that's when we started Tex uh and instead there have been 300 of them all over the world from Stockholm to Lana from Bucharest to Tokyo from Dubai that's the big X down there at the bottom to Sydney and you name them uh so it's a spread really much faster and much wider than we uh expected and all this yet again is based on community work and people that are just passionate about Ted about the ideas of the speakers of Ted about this model of sharing ideas and the basic concept that sharing ideas is good and can really change the world for the better now one of the interesting things here is that uh tedex has spread also to places that we had no expectation it will ever reach this is kber kibera is the biggest Shanti town in Africa 1 million people are said to be living there it's in Nairobi and somewhere there in the middle there is a shack which is a church and uh in August Tex kber took place there this guy here Tor dungu and uh yes they deserve that this young guy here is an entrepreneur Tony and uh together with a friend of his a development Aid worker organized uh Tes kibera uh he gave us short talk about being entrepreneur in Africa today a young entrepreneur they watched a couple of Ted videos and 70 people showed up and they had a afternoon of tedex in the middle of kib they're preparing the second one right as we speak uh and this is fatur is a town of 880,000 in the midle of Rajasthan India and There lives the family of masarat dud maseratti is a 29-year-old single Muslim woman she was at TX Dubai last fall and uh she was inspired by it she went back home and she said I want to bring this here we need this here she started calling up speakers from all over India including some big names they all said yes I'm coming and uh and then she went to see the Council of the local community school and they said no uh they said no because they said I want this event here because the council is all male and uh they were afraid that uh it would reflect bad on the school and the imams may have something to say about a young single Muslim woman organizing an event with male speakers and standing up in front of them introducing them uh she didn't give up she Garner support and she she printed flyers and she spoke about it around town and she became the Talk of the Town and uh then she went to see the Headmaster of the Hindu School asking for his venue and he said yes do it here and she did this January 1,000 people show up and that's masarat introducing the [Applause] speakers so when we see these kind of things coming in uh from the reports of the tedx events uh at Ted we very amazed at how far those 18 minutes when somebody shares an idea with insight and passion how far they can travel and all we do really is we try to put uh in place some mechanism to make that easier to make them travel even further lower the barrier to access create spaces for people to engage and act upon those ideas giving T organizers our brand and our content to create their Community because now we are all part of the Tex Aviv Community but somehow we also part of the big wide Ted family around uh the world and that's really uh something that comes down to one single simple truth and the simple truth is when you share Community happens so thank you for being part of this community thanks for listening thank you [Music]