TEDGlobal>Geneva
On Tuesday 8 December, a TEDGlobal Conference took place at the Bâtiment des Forces Motrices (BFM) in downtown Geneva.
Charlotte Lindberg Warakaulle, Director for International Relations at CERN, speaking at the workshop for TEDx organisers held at CERN (Image: Laetitia Gessler)
Curated by Bruno Giussani, the TED European Director, it was the first official TED event to take place in Switzerland. Under the theme “Critical Junctures” the program, which was unknown to the audience beforehand, featured two sessions and more than a dozen speakers. Among them were voices from local residents whose work has worldwide impact, such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres; Swiss neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch; Head of the Biorobotics Laboratory at EPFL, Auke Ijspeert; Founder of Apelab, Emilie Joly; and National Geographic explorer, Sarah Marquis. CERN was represented by a particle physicist from the LHCb collaboration, Harry Cliff, who is based in the UK and a fellow at the Science Museum in London.
In addition to the Swiss speakers, figures of worldwide note, such as former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and former tech executive Wael Ghonim, who anonymously used social media to help spark the Egyptian revolution in early 2011, took the stage. One of the standing ovations was for Caleb Harper, director of the Open Agriculture Initiative at MIT, who is studying what it means to apply digital and sensing technology to agriculture.
A total of 900 guests were invited to attend TEDGlobal>Geneva, half of which were TEDx organisers from all over the world. In fact, for the TEDx organisers, the event started two days earlier with a full day of workshops at CERN on Sunday and cultural tours and visits across Western Switzerland (plus a special session at the Graduate Institute) on Monday. In total almost 500 TEDx organisers took part in the 3-days event in Geneva, with the goal to provide them opportunities for learning and knowledge sharing. Attending this event qualifies TEDx organisers to hold an event with an audience bigger than 100 people, which is the traditional license given by TED.
"The whole three days at CERN, around Geneva and at the BFM weaved together beautifully, there was a lot of positive energy and a lot of love in this community, a striving to create and imagine the future, insights and inspiration, and certainly people have left with a good understanding of what this small city has to offer to the world, from the scientists in Meyrin to the diplomats around the Place des Nations to the startuppers down near Plainpalais and Acacias," said Bruno Giussani, TED European Director.
Only in the last year, there were almost 3000 TEDx events organised around the world. Together they created 18K talks with 450 million views; a number that is only about to grow.
TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TEDx programme supports independent organisers who want to create a TED-like event in their own community. CERN has organised 3 TEDxCERN events, the latest on 9 October 2015.
