Some of Steve’s photos are below.

Something special is happening in Berlin on the evening of Thursday 5 April — TEDxChange — The BIG Picture — will take place. So, what’s TEDxChange you ask?

TEDxChange is an initiative, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, devoted to ideas worth spreading in the areas of global health and development. The TEDxChange team works with TEDx organizers around the world to help facilitate meaningful discussions on topics such as vaccines, polio, malaria, HIV/AIDS, maternal and newborn child health, and agricultural development. The TEDxChange initiative also includes a global signature event convened by Melinda Gates and broadcast across the TEDx community.

The short video below explains a little more about TEDxChange.

Here at TEDxCanberra, we’ll be holding a very small (it is, after all, the Easter long weekend) official satellite event to coincide with the main event. Given that Berlin’s time zone doesn’t exactly mesh well with Canberra, we’re going to watch the archive of the live stream from Berlin.

As it turns out, it’ll actually be Good Friday here in Canberra; a day, regardless of our faith or not, that we should pause and consider those who share the planet with us, and how, especially for those in the developing world and in regions affected by chronic conditions otherwise controlled or eliminated in our part of the planet, just staying alive can be a struggle.

Trib, you’re the Creative Catalyst for TEDx Canberra. What on earth does that involve?

Organisations always have such terrible titles for their people and TEDxCanberra is at least a little guilty of the same thing, though we try to be creative without sounding like complete wankers. I could call myself “Licensee” and “Creative Director” and it’d be accurate, but using Creative Catalyst deliberately makes me focus on my role in our volunteer team; I’m the guy whose job it is to come up with impractical ideas, to toss things into the mix that others might not have thought of and to dream up the shoot for the stars version of things I’d like to see at TEDxCanberra each year.

As an example, I’m a huge fan of the Slovenian acapella choir, Perpetuum Jazzile (nerdy, I know). I’d just about do anything to have them at TEDxCanberra. But it’s not realistic, is it? It’s one of those crazy ideas. So, having that idea gives us a starting point to work from gives us a journey that’s more realistic — from Perpetuum Jazzile to acapella choir to local choir. That’s something we can bring to TEDxCanberra.

Of course, if we find a wealthy benefactor to get us PJ…

How does a TEDx event differ from TED?

TED’s like the NRL Grand Final (not that I’m a fan of NRL, I’m a union lad, myself) and TEDx is like the local Colts final. It’s smaller, less slick and more grassroots. I’ve been lucky enough to be to TED a couple of times now and it’s a mind-blowing experience. It’s like spending a week in a class full of geniuses who can’t see that “no” is an option. And it’s not just the presenters on stage, it’s everyone. Every person in the audience is just as interesting and capable as those on stage. Especially the little guys. And particularly the TEDx organisers. TEDx seeks to bring a micro version of that experience to local communities.

The community that I’m a part of — TEDx organisers from around the world — are amazing people. They’re all doing something significant and important in their own communities; from getting a TEDx event running in Baghdad to helping get startups off the ground to doing the most creative work in their field. Every person you turn to does something different and powerful. I’m actually headed to Doha in April to spend a week working with TEDx organisers from around the world on making TEDx an even better experience.

The team at TEDxCanberra are no different. We’ve got a core of volunteers (all TEDx events are run on a volunteer and non-profit basis; there’s nothing in it for us other than the doing) who work in a range of industries. They give up huge slabs of their time to help make TEDxCanberra real. In 2011 we burned something like 1200 hours of volunteer time to put our event on.

How long has TEDx Canberra been going?

I was at TED in 2009 and the announcement of TEDx was made not long after I came home. I stewed over it for a while and in February 2010 flicked an email to a few friends and other folk in canberra who’d been to events like BarCamp or were involved in the innovation community. After an early March meeting one Sunday in my lounge, we decided on making TEDxCanberra 2010 a reality. Eight months (and 1000 hours of volunteer time) later we had a sold out theater and 16 speakers good to go.

On a slightly grander scale, TEDxCanberra 2011 was much the same. We ramped up the production values but stayed in the same venue to ensure the experiements we tried were scalable and sustainable. This year, with lessons learned, we scale up again.

We’ve run two sold out events — 2010 and 2011 — at the National Library of Australia theater. It seats 300 people. Sadly, we’re moving on from the NLA this year. We love them for helping make the past two years a reality, but we had to turn away 250 people who wanted seats last year. That’s just not sustainable. Either we change venue to somewhere larger or it gets too exclusive, and we’re deliberately focussed on inclusiveness and the community. Without our community, there is no TEDxCanberra.

What makes TEDx Canberra special or different to other TEDx events?

Within the rules framework that all TEDx events run under, we can make a number of choices about how we run. One of those choices is how we decide who makes up our audience. We made a very deliberate decision for TEDxCanberra 2010 to be as open as we could. Unlike a number of TEDx events, we don’t curate our audience in any way. If there are places available, and you want one, you get one provided you pay your registration fee.

We don’t feel this approach diminishes the diversity or interestingness of our audience in any way. We had people aged from 10 to 80 in our audience last year. They came from all over including Darwin, North Queensland, outback South Australia and oddly enough, The Netherlands. About 30 per cent of the audience comes from outside Canberra. They have diverse jobs too; they’re public servants (it is Canberra, after all), diplomats, teachers (we get a lot of those), students, business people, NGO workers and more.

Our Exec Producer, Clare Conroy, insists the speaker lineup includes what she calls “head and heart” talks. There needs to be a range of things on stage that speak to our logical selves and our emotional selves. That’s why we’ve had everything from Nobel Laureates to high school students to 3rd sector social entrepreneurs to futurists to musicians and Australians of the Year on our stage.

That kind of rich mix makes for an invigorating day. No two talks are alike and we deliberately mix it up. It keeps the creative juices flowing, the talk in breaks excited, and brings diverse groups together that might otherwise not often be in the same place. There have been more than a few serendipitous meetings from our two events that have brought people together to collaborate.

What makes TEDx an event that Mumbrella and Encore’s readers (people who work in creative industries, media, marketing and screen) should attend?

Well, it’s awesome! And while that’s my subjective view, the feedback we get from participants suggests they have a pretty good time.

But in all seriousness, by coming to TEDxCanberra, you get a whole day of short talks from interesting people across a range of disciplines who are all doing something amazing, or important or creative (or all three and more) in order to change the world. This year, we’re focussing on an idea we’re calling “no neat bows” — we don’t want any of our talks to be those neat, packaged pieces where you walk away thinking “that was interesting”. Rather, we want all of our presenters to issue a challenge, or pose a question, or have audience members walk away motivated to take action to do something in their communities that makes a difference.

It’s about taking that TED maxim of “ideas worth spreading” and moving to what we’re calling “actions worth doing”.

Who would you like to see apply to take part as a presenter? What are your criteria, and who decides on the final line up?

Australia is so full of interesting people it’s hard to choose. We try to select presenters who will end up attracting the attention of the TED team in NYC, whose talk isn’t hyper-local, but addresses a wider issue. The two talks from TEDxCanberra 2011 selected for featuring on TED — Professor Thomas Pogge’s talk on the Health Impact Fund and Dr Stephen Coleman’s talk on the ethics of non-lethal weapons have both attracted over 160,000 views and hundreds of often heated comments. That’s exactly what we’re after!

I’ve actually got a bit of a wishlist for TEDxCanberra 2012:

• space and space science
• an adventurer
• a Muslim (woman?) to discuss something other than Western perceptions of Muslims.
• a storyteller (Sally Sara maybe?)
• a young person doing something important
• clever tech
• a faith leader
• an a capella choir

I’d definitely like more people to be aware enough of TEDxCanberra to apply to be a presenter or to suggest possible presenters to us. I’m sure Mumbrella and Encore readers know a bunch of these sorts of people (or are them). They should totally nominate. We announced our open nominations just last, week actually.

As for who decides, it’s a bit of a process. We’re constantly looking all over the place for interesting performers, speakers, doers of stuff. We mix those folks in with the nominations we receive and conduct a bit of a vetting process. Then, we invite a shortlist to tell us what they would say if they had the stage at TEDxCanberra. From there, we trim again and actually invite people to present or perform. We have a speaker curation team who does this alongside our leadership team to ensure we gather the best possible talent to showcase to the world.

Thank you!

No. Thank you for asking me to talk to you. It has been a pleasure.

Dickson College is once again hosting a Robotics Conference on Thursday Nov 17 from 2:00pm until 4:00pm. This will be an opportunity for educators, professions and community members to come together to share ideas about robotics programs in schools. Last year we had about 50 attendees from schools, universities, industry and government.  There will be talks, demonstrations, overviews of various robotics equipment, competition descriptions, and time to chat with people who have been there before.

If you are working with robots in your school, would like to incorporate robotics into your teaching, or are interested in  to see what schools and universities are currently doing in this field, please attend.  It is free and there will be coffee, tea, munchies and some cool robots to see. Please reply to this email if you plan to attend, so I can get an idea of numbers.

If you’re interested in being a part of this event, please contact Andrew Moss.

We couldn’t have done it, of course, without the amazing support from all our partners. We hope they get involved again next year.

We’ll have the video available as soon as we can. It’s already in post-production. In the meantime, there are already a bunch of photos available from our Music and Pictures guy, Gavin Tapp and the rest of the official photos will be available soon.

We’ve also sent out the audience feedback survey to you all. Please fill it in, as it’ll help us make TEDxCanberra 2012 better than ever. And, if you want to give us more detail about how you felt the day went, please comment here or write your feelings down at your own places online and let us know about them. We promise to link to them.

There are already a few pieces out there:

• Jen Frahm’s 28 TEDxCanberra take-aways
• presenter, Matt Noffs’ odd experience just before presenting
• volunteer, Gavin Tapp’s thoughts on being part of the team again in 2011
• 666 ABC Canberra’s thoughts from Melanie Tait and Jim Trail
• presenter, Nick Ritar, interviewed on 666 ABC Canberra
• The Canberra Times’ coverage, with perhaps the oddest headline ever (never trust a sub-editor, apparently)
• Craig Thomler’s live blog, which also captures a significant part of the #tedxcanberra tweet stream
• Emma Magenta discusses TEDxCanberra the day before the show on 666 ABC Canberra
• Andrey Sidorov’s photos on Google+, including some pretty fancy capoeira footwork from Simon Le and Emma Magenta
• volunteer, Tom Worthington’s thoughts the day before
• a few words from our friend, Jason Schoolmeester, licensee of TEDxDarwin
• CJ Mules lets us know it’s “for science”

For now, we have some tidy-up work to do to finish off with 2011, then we take a bit of a rest before heading into organising TEDxCanberra 2012. If at any time, you think you have an idea for a presenter we might like to look at, or you want to offer a pair of hands for the volunteer crew, please do!

Thanks for being a part of the TEDxCanberra family!

So, to apply to present your 3-minute talk at TEDxCanberra 2011 send your pitch (max 250 words or 1 minute video) to hello@tedxcanberra.org by 5pm Wednesday 7 September. Shortlisted entries will be contacted by Friday 9 September and requested to attend auditions (in person or via Skype if you’re not based in Canberra) the following week.

If you’re in need of a bit of inspiration, check out Kerrie Noonan’s audience talk from TEDxSydney 2011.

JR — The 2011 TED Prize Winner

I love graffiti art, so I couldn’t go past this art talk. JR is the 2011 TED Prize Winner and a graffiti artist and photographer. He creates pervasive art that aims to raise questions. One of my favourite projects from his ‘collection’ include Face 2 Face, which aims to explore and contribute to a better understanding between Palestinians and Israelis. The project made portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same job and posted them face to face in large formats, thus questioning what makes us different.
His TED wish is to create a “large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work”. Find out more at insideoutproject.net.

Carlo Ratti: Architecture that senses and responds

This is a fascinating talk that looks at the creation of environments powered by simple gestures caught through sensors. It’s a futuristic talk, exploring concepts that cross between the fields of art, architecture, science and technology.

I know we’re meant to cover only two talks in this post, but one of my all-time favourite TED talks is James Randi’s fiery takedown of psychic fraud, also mentioned by my team member Lauren Cochrane in her meet the team post. It’s a great entertaining talk looking at irrational beliefs.

Hans Rosling: Global Population Growth

I want to talk about my most favourite speaker, Hans Rosling. Hans Rosling can take a great deal of statistical data and use it to tell an impactful story about the developing and industrial world. His July 2010 talk regarding the world’s population growth to 9 billion people over the next 50 years and  raising the living standards of the poorest countries makes you stop to think about the future. I would encourage everybody to go and watch any of Hans Rosling’s talks.

Paul Nicklen: Tales of ice-bound wonderlands

Paul Nicklen is a nature photographer and produces stories for magazines such as the National Geographic.  He uses his photography to generate global awareness about wildlife in isolated and endangered environments and the impact we are causing to our world. In this talk Paul speaks about his underwater experience with a leopard seal who tried to feed him penguins.