This is one of my biggest non-technological initiative. During my 1st year as a graduate student, I gathered a few of my classmates, some of my university’s administrators, some CEOs and regional actors and a few brillant minds and I reunited them for a TEDx conference.
Below are the official recordings from TEDxTalks YouTube channel. There’s a lot of topics covered in there : biomimicry, emotional AI, climate change or even prosthetics. How they all gather together, you ask ? Well, it’s all about the theme : « Alter-Natifs » (french for « alternatives »), which is intentionally spelled as a combination of the words « alter » (that refers to “the other”) and « natifs » (french for « natives »). It literally means « born different », or « born in another way ». Under this theme I wanted to illustrate change, from its mechanism to its consequences, at different level and through different perspectives. I find the whole process of change very interesting as it leads to very specific and sometimes opposite behaviours. Just think about the last 20 years and how rapidly our society evolved looking at technology, economy, environment, individuals, … Note that I am talking about evolution, which is unfortunately not necessarily linked to progress.
TED and TEDx
You might first want to know about TED and TEDx conferences (I understood they were quite popular but encountered several people who have never heard of them while working on this project). Basically, TED is a gloabl non-profit organisation that promotes ideas worth sharing (see what I did here) under short (<18min) engaging and inspiring talks. Their official events usually involve a lot of major global players from different expertise areas (I won’t name-drop here, I think is best for you to form your own judgement). This is their main activity ; one other responsibility they hold is to allow individuals to organise their own local version of a TED conference, therefore named TEDx. It is a great community, and a great opportunity for you to share to the whole world the everyday genius minds around you.
This exactly what I wanted to do at this time : gathering a few people around some values we considered worth knowing, and sharing to others what inspired us around us.
How it all started
An official TEDx event thus requires a TEDx license granted to an individual. I ended up holding one, and quite frankly, the story behind is nothing but ordinary. It all started after a normal grad student’s day as I was searching for some tutorials to watch from a chemical class I was taking. Of course as usual when it comes to YouTube videos, I ended up watching anything else from what I was looking for. I stumbled upon a TEDx talk from a french actor - he was basically sharing how he got where he was, with nothing but dreams and perseverance. It’s actually a popular TEDx talk, but to me the most inspiing thing was that he was my age (still is, obviously).
What he was doing didn’t actually matter (you guessed it, I am not a cinema-goer). What really mattered was that he was doing it well enough so that I could actually see him on stage, giving his speech while I was still confused about spinodal decomposition. So when I asked myself what could I do with all of this inspiration and I saw that he intervened during a TEDxMcGill event, the answer was pretty straightfoward. The next morning, I talk of it with one of my classmates, and he agreed it could be cool to have one in our engineering school. Because we had a gap in our schedules, we directly went to our university administrators office. In less than an hour, we were pitching this idea to the studies director. When I asked him “Why don’t we have one already”, I undestood “for no reason” as an answer. So I gathered a team, contacted TED and said I wanted to do just that. TEDxIMTMinesAles was born.
How it all ended
Since it was the first TEDx event of the city, and the second one at a regional level, there was a lot of different stakeholders involved. Everyone had their own interest in participating in such an event. I realised what it meant to be lead organiser of a multi-disciplinary public event : being commited into something that is bigger that us, and having the responsibility to make decisions. These decisions were sometimes hard, sometimes easy, but these never were completely obvious as it impacted different people at different levels. This is key for making pertinent decisions : managing consequences. The more predictible the better, so we can evaluate risks and build bigger and stronger things on top.
I have fond memories of it as it enabled me to met incredible people who was doing incredbile work. To this day, TEDx events from my university are still organised every year by different teams of students. This is a pretty cool legacy.
Note that I could organise conferences without the TEDx label. However, I knew I couldn’t engage with so many stakeholders without introducing something they’d at least partially already know. Also, recording talks was important to me. By the way, you can follow TEDxIMTMinesAles’s future events here.
Just like anything in this world, the difficult thing here was to put everything in place to be able to give life to what we had in mind. But this is actually key. Because in the end, it is all about how much effort you want to put it in. This is what makes what you care about really different, and this is how you can make it different.
