TEDActive Projects
Get involved in a TEDActive Project: explore, collaborate and -- most importantly -- act on the vital issues raised at TED. This year we’re exploring the topics of Education, Mobility, Sustainability, Public Art, Social Networks and Travel with the goal of delivering a set of micro-actions that anyone can do to move a project forward.
Projects news from the TEDActive Blog:
09 May 2011
Public HeART felt
We brought our hearts together at TEDActive and publically peaced our lost with found.
Some pinned their heart to red felt, remembering lost loved ones.
Charlotte’s hand made stencils of Amy’s hands, and hands on hearts on tees…
quickly made new friends, and found their way to the TEDActive stage;
where our public heART throb, miss amy kr, lifted our hearts with this sweet farewell:
TEDActive 2011 farewell video: March Forth! from Amy Krouse Rosenthal on Vimeo.
Photo credit: Michael Brands for TED
24 March 2011
Social Up: First efforts
- Public (not social) transport
Two weeks after our goodbye at TEDActive and our plans to social up our mobility, I wanted to share my efforts so far:
As I was leaving Palm Springs towards LAX I posted an update on Facebook to offer a ride to anybody going my way. Gerardo Betancourt was on his way to LA with a bus, but we missed each other by just a few minutes. Learning: next time I should post my moves earlier.
On my way to London, I managed to sleep for 9 hours straight… the joys of a very intense week! As the plane was landing, I started chatting with a film director from New Zealand next to me, and we ended up sharing a cab to east London. Good one.
On my way to Paris in the Eurostar, I met a chatty Italian lawyer working in the city. Enjoyed a great football chat and ended up exchanging cards. You never know when you need a lawyer I guess. Good one, again!
Finally, as I was going to the airport to pick up my girlfriend last Saturday, I suffered all sorts of delays typical of public transport during weekends in London. For the next airport pickup, I checked Whipcar, the neighbour-to-neighbour car sharing site and there’s a lady close to home who owns a Peugeot 207 that I can borrow 4 hours for £20… Cheaper and more reliable. Good learning.
Still, I haven’t managed to have a chat with my neighbours (after 6 months, it feels a bit wierd to knock the door with a tortilla de patatas to say hello), nor succeeded to chat with anybody in the Tube, or the Bus (Londoners enter in trance when they walk in public transport..). Those will be my challenges for the next two weeks.
best wishes, Luis
21 March 2011
The Identity Crisis
Imagine a classroom where content from every possible discipline is explored. Where diverse individuals have dozens of entry points to inspiration. Where the teachers present the most relevant, compelling material – with the invitation to take action.
Sound familiar? TED’s learning environment not only nurtures “ideas worth spreading” – it enables a diverse crowd to take ownership of this mission. Just as teachers utilize TED talks to engage students, the collective identity of TED can be used to empower them.
There is no “textbook” answer on how to empower students. The question itself is an invitation to explore how the full spectrum of contributors can get involved – teachers, students, and communities in every corner of the world.
The learning environment at TED takes us on a journey from inspiration to action. The result is transferable; the product is a collective identity. Darren, Trent and I sought to define a process through this lens:
Inspiration. Students need to learn how to dream, to discover the breadth of possibilities that exist and the way forward. This is not just the realm of teachers, mentors, and experts, but of the community as well.
John Hunter’s World Peace Game provides students a venue to delve into real-world problems, realizing the depth of challenges they will face in their lives and how they will need to work together to solve them.
Choice. Decisions are a fundamental component of life. Students need to understand their identity and feel safe making mistakes. They should be able to learn and grow without fear.
The Khan Academy enables students to discover at their own pace – creating a virtual classroom that supports learning inside and outside of the classroom.
Action. Choice begets action. If a student has the confidence to create change in the world, they are empowered. This intersection of teachers and students creates an environment for action.
TED Prize winner, José Antonio Abreu, has inspired millions of students to have dreams – providing them a voice through the orchestra. His program, El Sistema, uses music as a vehicle for social action. Maestro Abreu inspires participants to give back – to teach and spread the message.
Gustavo Dudamel, Maestro Abreu’s most famous student, did just that. In 2007, Gustavo became the Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. With this appointment, Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA) was born – the adaptation of El Sistema in Los Angeles. Today, hundreds of students participate in YOLA from communities that wouldn’t otherwise have access to music education and its social benefits.
Our education system is in an identity crisis – a cycle of educational-poverty in our schools. We have a responsibility to support our schools, to inspire our students and support their choices. We need to allow students to create their own identity – as individuals, classes, schools, and communities. This sets them free from other pressures.
How? Each community has relevant problems to solve and classrooms that could connect to solve them. What if you identified a community need and engaged a local classroom or school to solve it? What if you introduced a new game or resource to a classroom teacher?
The next generation of innovators is sitting in classrooms right now.
How will you help them find their voice?
18 March 2011
TEDActiveEDU Synthesized and Visualized
Check out this great re-cap of the TEDActiveEDU group through the eyes of Stacy Weitzner (seen above), our visual thinker that was brought in by redu to help the education project team bring together their ideas for action on the same board. More pics of Stacy’s handiwork can be seen after the jump >>
11 March 2011
A week of social
Last week, I participated in the TEDActive Project – Social Networks. The purpose was to explore how we might use our social networks to turn inspiration into action.
Monday. We meet, 20 people with experience across different social networks and with roles from journalists to artists to change agents and connectors.
The expertise of the people within the group is astonishing, each of us bringing a “superpower” to the group. As discussion unfolds, we surface questions to explore with the wider TEDActive audience:
- How might you find what matters to you through your social networks?
- How do you discover what you can do about the thing(s) that matter to you?
- How might you tip inspiration into action?
- How might we tackle big things with human-sized action?
- How might we nurture your social aura (effectivess, reputation)?
- How might social networks make you more courageous?
- How might you move from tweet to street?
Tuesday. I find myself in a random group to share lunch. I say I’m enjoying being a part of the projects and we’re exploring questions like “Do social networks make you more courageous?”. The conversation kicks into gear. While the projects are useful for having a focus and meeting a group during an overwhelming week, they also encourage deeper conversations.
Wednesday: We set about putting an experiment into place. The most difficult part of the project has been finding how to capture our different passions. We’d been charged to develop a set of “micro-actions”, but how do you find a way to draw those differences together in a meaningful way?
Thursday: One minute. Our story.
When I woke this morning and checked my messages, I had a link to a video. The video was made by two Year 12 students, Nile and Hannah from Huntington School in York in the UK. And they made the video to explain why they’re excited to hear about the TEDED program.
They found TEDED through their teacher, who was sent the link by his head of school. The Head of School found out through Sir Ken Robinson who sent out a tweet asking people to support this initiative. Sir Ken sent the tweet because he was messaged by Marcus, a member of our group for whom Sir Ken is a mentor, a personal connection. In a single day, with 9 targeted messages, our group got the TEDED link into 6,017 schools across the US, the UK and Australia.
Rather than proposing a specific micro-action, we are proposing a new micro- philosophy. Know the power of the people in your network, know the way to reach them, and know to ask them to act in a way that matters. Whether it’s showing support for the middle east, participating in JR’s global art project, or spreading TEDED we’re asking you to be deliberate in your social networks. When you share your ideas from this week, we’re asking you to be the signal, not the noise.
Friday and beyond. Amanda Rose summed it up best:
- Be yourself. People respond to those with an authentic social media voice.
- Listen and give back to your community.
- Chose the right social media channel for your message. Consider the audience.
- Clearly define what it is you are asking.
- Be passionate. Show people how they can be part of something bigger.
- Report back. People want to feel valued and hear the impact.
The outcome of TEDActiveSOC project is to ask all TEDsters to take on this micro-philosophy. Make these the Six TED Commandments of Social Networks to turn inspiration into action.
09 March 2011
“It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.”
Mobility means different things to different people. It can mean everything from communications, access to information, transportation of goods to the mobilization of governments and organizations through calls to action.
In order to narrow this scope, the brief for the purposes of the TEDActive Mobility project was taken to mean:-
How can we make the world even smaller, more accessible
Technology and communication have already done an amazing job of making the World smaller, more accessible. So in our look at mobility, we specifically turned our minds to transportation, especially in terms of people.
So how does one make the World smaller and more accessible from a human transportation point of view? We might conclude that we need to:-
1 Build faster planes
2 Double the width of highways
3 Restructure aging public transport infrastructure
But given we had a total of 4 days, and were tasked with producing an output of a “microaction” none of the above were considered particularly practical.
So the brainstorming, led by the inimitable Luis Cilimingras of IDEO London and Jerri Chou from Lovely Day, that followed over the 4 day period ultimately led to a lot of Post-it notes of small ideas, themes and stories related to the needs of people transporting themselves from A to B.
This type of brainstorming activity, between 10 or so people that have never met each other before, but having a commonality (the love of TED talks) itself was an interesting social process. When looking back at some of the Post-it note themes now, what is interesting to see is that almost all of them relate to some form of community or social ethos.
Sharing came up a lot. Luis started to speak about it on our blog and the conversation kept on going. One of the problems with the car sharing paradigm is that people can feel uncomfortable sharing their personal space, especially with a stranger. The antithesis of what “social” and “community” are meant to represent.
How do we solve that?
Despite the majority of our group being either technologists or in some way connected to technology, thoughts started to turn to the old-school philosophies of social and community – real people being connected in a very real way, person to person. Borrowing a cup of sugar from a neighbour or offering a ride to a hitch-hiker.
When we debated this, a sense of order started to fall out of the chaos of all these Post-it notes. In our quest to “make the World smaller”, and the advances in technology and communications over the last couple of decades, are we at risk of losing some valuable social skills? We can talk about systems like Facebook and Twitter, which are social in their nature of enabling human interactions, but what is the quality of those interactions? You can have a conversation or interaction with someone on the other side of the World, in 140 characters. That’s great, but is that really a quality interaction?
So maybe our quest of “making the World smaller” is flawed. As a race we have an incredibly rich and diverse tapestry of cultures which are born from the social interactions that we have and the communities that we create. Every culture has its unique identity, folklore, language and context. We think it unlikely that anyone will ever look back on a Twitter conversation that they had and feel the same way that they might about a story that was told to them by someone in person, with context, language, folklore and identity.
So we decided instead that we should celebrate the fact that the World is big. Rather than try and make it any smaller, and without the time or cash to make a supersonic passenger jet in 4 days, we concentrated our thoughts on themes that might improve the quality of mobility and not the speed of covering distance. Make people bigger.
Without this improvement in quality and in social and community interaction we believe the problem of otherwise great ideas like car sharing will never be fully solved. So the first step, in our conclusion, is to encourage people to engage with their local community. If you get to know your next door neighbour, how much more likely would it be that they will naturally offer you a lift next time they’re driving in your direction?
The distilled essence of our 4 days of brainstorming is the following:-
We encourage the TED community to “Social Up” and engage more with their local community. This can be as simple as getting to know your neighbour that you’ve lived next to for years but have never spoken to or getting together with a mate and taking a journey together on the subway. Make mobility a social experience.
We move because we need social interactions, should we start making our movement more social?
It is our belief that this is a critical first step to making concepts like car sharing a practical reality. As Greg Anderson put it:-
“It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey”.
By Dean Elwood
09 March 2011
Ideas are free. It’s spreading them that is expensive.
I’m a big fan of the concept of “ideas worth spreading,” but I also realize how hard it can be to give a little idea with potential the nudge it needs to flourish in the wider world. One way to be more effective is to see where obstacles and pathways exist.
Before TED, we started gathering tweets with the #tedactive hash tag to see which ideas were rising to the the top (and which were languishing). We can also see who’s driving the conversation (you’ll see our team member @acarvin as the fountainhead for a ton of retweets), and some trends in how great ideas go from theTED stage in Long Beach to making a difference in far flung cities around the globe.
Check it out yourself on this dynamically updating map (
thanks to Claude and the team at Nexalogy) and we’d welcome your feedback on how to use this to lower the “cost” of spreading worthwhile ideas!
http://nexalogy.com/demo/tedactive/
07 March 2011
Social up your ride – in the next ten days
If we move to be social; how can we make our moves more social?
Here’s our microaction: SocialUp; make your transportation a social interaction
+Speak to your neighbours and get to know them better. Perhaps they work close to your office.
+Tweet out when you are going somewhere, or facebook your destination, so you can have a nice chat while at it.
+Speak to an stranger in public transport…
Get creative about how you do it, but we ask that you take at least one new action in the next 10 days. Then share your action with us using the tag #TEDActiveMOB #SocialUp and/or share your story with the TED community by emailing it to projects@ted.com with SocialUp in the subject line.
Many thanks everybody for your help,
Luis
03 March 2011
Caring Chaos
Initially, I hadn’t planned on participating in the Sustainability Project at TEDActive .
When I first saw the email about the project teams, I thought it was too big a time commitment (two hours a day!), especially for my first TEDActive conference. I also didn’t want to sign up to “lead” anything, as I thought there were many others more qualified than I. Oh, how things change!
Shortly after receiving the project team invitation from the TED folks, I made the mistake of posting a note on the TEDActive Facebook group asking if there were other sustainability professionals who wanted to connect during the conference. This prompted Sarah to personally invite me to participate in the Sustainability Project Team. When I told her I didn’t want to lead anything, she explained that all team participants are leaders. I just couldn’t turn down this invitation.
During our first meeting on Monday, I thought we spent a lot of time going in circles. At least we did so by writing with dry erase markers on the windows of the Living Center; boy was that fun! Over the course of the next couple days we met frequently during breaks and meals. I continued to feel like our team wasn’t getting very far, and felt frustrated by the brainstorming process.
But last night something magical happened. We all agreed that the TED Talks should include calls to action. We decided that the TEDx Curator platform should be expanded so that TED docents or guides could link TEDTalks to action items and serve as ambassadors to their cause. We also thought that TEDx events should have local calls to action in which their participants can engage.
WOW! Now that’s powerful stuff.
I also learned a lot about myself during this collaborative process. Having run my own business for the past eight years (up until February, 2010), sometimes I forget how to play well with others. Focus and patience are not my strong suits, and my participation in the sustainability project really pushed me to hone both those skills. As my good friend, and our project spokesperson, Ted Ning of LOHAS said, conversations in groups like this often contract and expand numerous times before they get to their end destination. The good news is that I think we’ve finally arrived, a lot more focused and even a bit more patient.
Thank you TED and and my sustainability project cohorts, for this inspirational growth experience!
03 March 2011
Social networks — your interpretation?
I love connecting with people! Love meeting them, understanding where they come and what makes them who they are. Through my travels I have met amazing individuals. I was born in Senegal, where for generations, the palaver tree was a symbol of communication, sharing and collaboration throughout Africa — people would gather under its protective shade to listen to stories, share ideas and news and resolve community problems and conflicts. This made me realize while working on the social networks project that we are all connected.
TEDActive is a social network, and for me it’s like the old beautiful tree we see in villages of Africa. I deeply believe that makes a difference to humanity and what makes us safe, strong and able to grow as individuals.
Our social network group has pulled ideas from all around the world, drawing on people’s expertise in documenting Middle Eastern and African issues, understanding markets and mapping humanity. We looked at complexity in online and offline networks, how online reputation or “social aura” is nurtured, and how we can turn inspiration into action. Each of us in the group has chosen one of seven questions which we will ask our fellow attendees and people in our social networks as a way of gathering more insight. And we’ll use your responses to inform human-sized actions we can take at the end of the week to spread inspiration.
Here are some of the questions we asked:
Social networks
And here are some videos:
Are social networks good or evil? You can decide … but we hope it is good, and that maybe each of us, in our own way can make a difference, be courageous, find a purpose and share it.
Together, we have the power to change our world.
Create your own TEDActive project: If you're registered for TEDActive 2011, you can apply to start your own project. We're accepting applications for projects that cover any topic, from food to robotics ... Apply now »
TEDActive Projects on Twitter
Special thanks to our partner, IfWeRanTheWorld:
