TEDx events bring ideas worth sharing this autumn

Stepping into the shoes of the worldwide success of TED, TEDx conferences have become a worldwide phenomenon and, since last October, avid local fans have brought the concept to Romania too. Behind their enthusiasm is a passionate and catching belief that ideas have the power to change us and the world we live in – all in the spirit of “ideas worth sharing”.

Simona Bazavan

The first TED event was organized back in 1984 in the US, where it started out as a conference that brought together people from three distinct fields: technology, entertainment and design. Thus TED.

Over the years, TED has become a nonprofit dedicated to the mission of building a “clearinghouse” that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers and doers, and an environment where the curious can engage with ideas and each other. Today, TED has turned into a global network of conferences curated by the American private nonprofit Sapling Foundation.

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And because the concept has become so popular, the TEDx program (x stands for independently organized event) was initiated, giving local community members the chance to organize their own “TED-like” events under a license.

There is a TEDxParis, a TEDxSaigon and, since last October, a TEDxBucharest.“When the program was launched, we were among the first teams to apply for a license. (…) In 2009 the TEDxBucharest team was the youngest team in the world to organize a TEDx event,” Oana Toiu, member of the organizing team, told Business Review.

The organizers’age may have seemed an impediment in the license application process but TEDxBucharest 2009 in itself turned out to be a success, described by participants as “nothing short of spectacular”. After the experience of the 2009 edition, which was limited to 120 participants, for this year’s event the team obtained the next level license that has no restrictions, except the general TED guidelines.

TEDxBucharest 2010 will take place on 15 October, organized by a group of 11 young professionals, with an age average of 23. “We are in a large majority the same as in the first edition in 2009. As the event has evolved, both in concept and size, so did the organizing team. This year we are operating on a volunteer basis under the umbrella of the youth NGO Generation Y, founded by the conference curator, Carmen Oprea,” Toiu added.

Speakers at TEDxBucharest 2009 included Alexandra Nichita “the young Picasso”; Alex Gavan, the youngest Romanian alpinist to conquer an 8000m peak; Mircea Tudor, the first ever inventor to win a Geneva award by an unanimous jury decision; Dumitru Popescu, from ARCA; Mircea Toma; Bogdan Naumovici and Sandra Pralong. The scale and complexity of this year’s edition will be different, organizers say. It will include more participants, more international speakers, a wider variety of topics approached by the speeches and additional events dedicated to the local TED community as well as a higher online interaction with this dedicated community.

Attendance is by application form and standard registration costs USD 100. “In an event such as this, where the space, the atmosphere and participants’ engagement are just as important as the speakers, we need great people in the room, not only on stage. We are looking for the thinkers and doers of our time, be they activists, diplomats, business people, inventors, entrepreneurs, journalists, artist or just amazing people,” Toiu concluded.

Outside the capital, this autumn will also bring TEDxBanat. The event will be organized by Alexandru Bleau, Cristina Putan and

Oltea Zambori, who for the past year have been involved in related online events such as the Startup Days and Tweetmeet Conferences in Timisoara and Cluj.

“TED is an extraordinary event from which you leave motivated and carrying new ideas and new knowledge. We have wanted for some time now to bring such an event to the Timisoara and Banat community, and the opportunity to organize it under the TED license was a pleasant surprise for us. It is also worth mentioning that we are all three TED.com fans,” Bleau told Business Review. The main discussion topic of the event, which will take place on November 19, will be “projecting the future” and some of the speakers who have already confirmed their presence are Cristian Manafu, Stefan Szakal, Amalia Matei and Cladiu Teohari.

After TEDxBucharest2009 others stepped in, elsewhere in Romania. Earlier this year there were similar events in Cluj and Iasi.

The curator of TEDx Cluj and the person who acquired the license is Cristian Dascalu, freelance business development consultant. The motivation behind the decision to bring such an event to Cluj was an easy one, Lorand Minyo, liaisoning strategist, responsible for the communication for the event, told Business Review. ”We all were huge fans of TED and we had to share our passion with the great people of Cluj – most of whom had already heard of TED and were eager to participate in a TEDx event, not to mention our promise to bring something unique to Cluj,” he said. He added that the team will organize a new TEDx Cluj event within two months. “Official details on this are not public at the moment, but they will be from September 1,” he said.

In Iasi the event was organized by the Youth Academy. “We are a young organization actively involved in non-formal education. We believe in and support the diversification of learning methods through interactive workshops and projects meant to develop youngsters’ interpersonal abilities (…),” Carmen-Laura Nita of the Youth Academy told Business Review. The main topic of TEDxIasi was “what makes people happy”.

Photo: Alex Spineanu