TEDxMcGill

TEDxMcGill
Status Active
Genre General conference
Venue Le Salon 1861
Location(s) Montreal
Country Canada
Attendance 100
Organized by Student volunteers
Filing status Non-profit
Website
http://www.tedxmcgill.ca/

TEDxMcGill is a Montreal-based conference that focuses on disseminating "ideas worth spreading". It was created in 2009 by McGill student volunteers. Speakers are chosen to share their story and singular experience.[1] The next conference is to be held on March 19, 2016 under the theme Paradigm Shift. TEDxMcGill takes its name from McGill University, which hosts the conference. Along with TEDxConcordia and TEDxToronto, it is one of the largest TEDx events in Canada. Although TEDx events are licensed by TED, individual events are local and self-organized.[2]

About TED

TED, the parent organization of TEDxMcGill
Main article: TED (conference)

TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences and is the organization that makes possible TEDx events. The speakers are given a maximum of 18 minutes to present their ideas in the most innovative and engaging ways they can. Past presenters include Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Malcolm Gladwell, Al Gore, Gordon Brown, Richard Dawkins, Bill Gates, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and many Nobel Prize winners.[3] As of 2002, TED is headed by British former computer journalist and magazine publisher Chris Anderson.[4]

Since June 2006,[5] the conference's talks (as well as several TEDx talks) have been offered for free viewing online on the organization's website. As of July 2010, the 700 talks have been viewed a combined 290 million times and still attracting a growing global audience.[6] In 2008, TED made available the TEDx brand, a program that enables schools, businesses, libraries or just groups of friends to enjoy a TED-like experience with events they individually organize, design and host.[7] As of 2010, TEDx events have been held in over 60 countries.[8]

Main event

TEDxMcGill's main annual event is held in different places every year,[9] but it reaches out the academic and montréalaise community, attracting a larger audience of TED enthusiasts. Although all organizers are student volunteers from McGill University, the university provides no funding (as the event is independently organized). The conference typically lasts a single day.

This year's theme, Paradigm Shift, envisions talk that challenge society's views. The world is rapidly changing. The usual and accepted way of doing and thinking is no longer necessarily the usual or the accepted. The past few decades have brought about tremendous advances in technology, science and medicine, notions and philosophies, and values and attitudes. Our theme presents the opportunity to share important ideas that you believe have contributed or will contribute to the next decades’ or to the next century’s advancements.The Paradigm Shift will set an invigorating tone for the event while remaining abstract and open to interpretation. This will allow the audience to be exposed to a diversified portfolio of topics and be able to walk away inventing their own, individual set of connections. We believe this will make for a more engaging, personal, and surprising experience. It will also generate a wider array of questions, and much more lively discussion.

History

In June 2009, a group of five McGill University students, Tahnee Pantig, Ali Withers, Jason Tan De Bibiana, Jacob Cohen and Claire Durocher, got together to create the first TEDx event in Montreal. Three conferences have now been held under the TEDxMcGill banner. The first conference gathered 16 speakers from different backgrounds (students, professors, analysts, musicians, and Andy Nulman, the co-founder of the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival) to initiate discussions on the theme of "Talks for Tomorrow". Fifteen speakers and more than 600 people, including the McGill student body but also Montreal at large, met during the second conference themed "Relentless Curiosity" in 2010.[10] The 2011 event was held on November 13 at Bain Mathieu.[11] under the theme of Redefining Reality. [12]

See also

References

External links

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