At the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, TED’s June Cohen (she’s Director of TED Media and a co-host of the TED Conference with Chris Anderson) was a featured speaker. During her time on stage she told the story of what opening TED’s content to the world through the TED website has done for the organisation. It’s far more than she (and many of us) ever imagined and a fascinating story.
Enjoy.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=05f17bcd-f8fc-4a15-9c6f-ce7f69d232e5)
At TEDxCanberra, the issue of social justice generally, and mental health specifically is something dear to our hearts. It’s rare that you encounter someone in your life that hasn’t been touched by mental illness in some form or another.
It’s for this reason that we are absolutely delighted to announce that Professor Pat McGorry, the 2010 Australian of the Year, will be a speaker at TEDxCanberra 2010 on 23 October.
Professor McGorry has a long history of leadership on the issues and facts surrounding those suffering from mental illness and acting as a strong advocate for them in matters of policy reform.
He has been especially outspoken since being named as Australian of the Year, including several media pieces detailing his views with respect to government inaction on mental health reform and taking part in the GetUp! campaign, Health Matters.
At TEDxCanberra, we’re really looking forward to Pat taking the stage and bringing the issues of mental health reform to the forefront of our audience’s attention.
Getting the word out about your event is always one of the hardest things to do. Having a way to effectively distribute your press materials, especially in today’s fast-moving social media driven world, is another. Which is why TEDxCanberra are delighted to announce that PitchEngine, the social PR platform, have come on board as a supporter, helping us get the word out.
Here are some words from Jason Kinztler, Founder and CEO of PitchEngine:
We are delighted to be able to support TEDx Canberra. We love the whole TED concept of Ideas Worth Spreading – without ideas, nothing happens and without new, fresh ideas nothing new and fresh happens.
And big ideas are useless without good execution and a truck-load of good, hard work. Listen, learn and work your face off.
PitchEngine is itself a big idea, conceived and implemented in a small town in Wyoming and now going global. So the TEDx Canberra theme, Thinking Way Beyond, works for us too.
TEDxCanberra will be working with Des Walsh, PitchEngine’s Australian representative to make sure all our release needs are covered. Here’s what Des had to say:
I just love the comment that “TEDxCanberra with be the event the 2020 Summit should have been”. It’s a privilege to be able to provide some support to help you get the message out and get more involvement, in Australia and globally.
To cement the deal, here’s our first TEDxCanberra social media release! Further releases will be hosted at the TEDxCanberra Newsroom.
Spread the word around!
After some negotiation and delays, we are proud to announce our Venue Partner.
TEDxCanberra will be held at one of Australia’s great national cultural institutions, the National Library of Australia.
The Library has generously provided space for all aspects of TEDxCanberra, including their 297 seat theatre, which will host the majority of the day, their Grey Area for all breaks and other spaces. Additionally they are providing AV support, some coördination and publicity support.
We could not be happier and believe the NLA provides a very distinguished place for the very first TEDxCanberra.
For those who aspire one day to deliver a talk at TED, this tongue-firmly-in-cheek talk from Sebastian Wernicke at TEDActive 2010 reveals all the secrets of a great TED Talk.
Even with the humor, it’s surprisingly revealing. There’s more than a grain of truth there.
As a bonus for everyone, Sebastian has actually produced a little engine to build nonsense TED Talks from the word analysis he did. It’s a bit of fun.
At TEDxCanberra, we’ll be working with our speakers on something a little less silly and a lot more meaty. Hopefully, we’ll end up delivering something all our attendees really value.
Stay tuned for a couple of BIG announcements this week, including, finally, our venue gets revealed.
We’ve been holding off announcing more speakers as we wanted to do our big venue announcement first. But, as that’s taking a bit of time to sort out, we’re giving you more speakers, and a treat to go with one of them.
So, with no further ado, our next two presenters for TEDxCanberra 2010 are…
William DeJean is an internationally recognised educator, focussing on inspiring teaching and student empowerment. William has been working with AVID students and teachers for nearly 15 years, and has helped begin the first AVID Australia program in 2009. He currently lectures in education at Macquarie University.
Will Steffen is the high-profile Executive Director of the ANU Climate Change Institute. Renowned as a straight talker and unafraid of calling it as he sees it, his views are sought internationally — as his own work and as reference material for others discussing our world’s changing conditions.
As an aside, Will Steffen is currently being featured as one of Ericsson’s 20 About 2020, their campaign focussing on big ideas for our future and positive outlooks through change. His video for that campaign is below.
We hope you’re looking forward to these new TEDxCanberra speakers!
We all know obesity is a massive issue in Western societies. Yet many of us continue to feed our faces with convenience foods and do the same to our children.
Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize this year was awarded because of his work, particularly with children, to prevent childhood obesity, which has significant long term implications for overall public health, as well as the health and wellbeing of the individuals affected. Watch the video of Jamie’s TED Prize talk below to see just how much harm is being caused.
Have you ever paused to think what that’s doing to you and your kids?
Jamie Oliver’s work is already seeing positive outcomes for the children he’s helped by transforming the way their school lunches are prepared. Just days ago, The Guardian published a piece entitled Jamie Oliver’s school dinners shown to have improved academic results reporting some of the singualrly astounding outcomes kids in the UK have seen as a result of his earlier work that is now being taken to the USA:
In no small way, we could do with similar nutrition education and outcomes here in Australia. Though there are far fewer schools serving daily lunches to their children, school tuckshops are still, in many cases, serving up fast food that is high in fat and low in nutritional value.As parents, we should be placing strong pressure on our schools to ensure that junk food is not on the menu and treats, which we all love, are available in sensible portions.
Now that would be an Education Revolution!
How exciting! Today we get to announce more speakers!
The two inspiring women below will be joining us at TEDxCanberra to enlighten, educate and hopefully inspire you too.
Julie Posetti’s media career began in the late 1980’s in the industrial city of Wollongong where she worked for commercial radio and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. She has spent time on the ABC’s flagship radio current affairs programs AM, PM and The World Today and now teaches Journalism at the University of Canberra.
As Executive Director for the Centre for Policy Development, Miriam Lyons describes her role as “to spend time thinking about how to improve the fairness and sustainability of Australian public policy over the long term”. She was a delegate at the 2020 Summit and has appeared on the ABC’s Q&A, where the Twitter audience pretty much voted her Prime Minister.
We’ll be announcing more interesting and exciting presenters for TEDxCanberra in the coming weeks. Keep a watch here on on Twitter and Facebook for announcements.
Or is that afeet (given there are many).
Yesterday, we held the first TEDxCanberra planning brainstorm with an even dozen enthusiastic folks gathering at acidlabs HQ to puzzle out a bunch of problems and logistics around the event. It’s all coming together nicely in terms of assigning roles and responsibilities and figuring out on what and where we need to spend money or attract support.
Here’s how things are tracking for us so far:
We’ve a long way to go, but with extra bodies involved now, we’re well underway.
And we still need your ideas and help, so please contribute.
Exciting times here at TEDxCanberra as we bring you news of our first two confirmed speakers.
As a highly respected aboriginal elder, Tom Calma has a long career working in the public sector to further indigenous social justice and health reform. He was until recently the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission.
Kristin Alford is the Managing Director of Bridge 8, an industry development and science communications consultancy based in Adelaide. She is an internationally recognised science communicator who also lectures in Foresight and Social Change at the University of Adelaide.
We have two more speakers whose confirmations are nearly done. We’ll announce those as soon as we can.