Nine notable speakers presented their “ideas worth sharing” as part of the third TEDx Madison event held at the Bartell Theater Saturday.
TEDx Madison is an independently organized event modeled after TED, the Technology, Entertainment and Design global conference aimed at spreading innovative ideas and concepts about the world around us.
Several local sponsors put on the event, including 100state, a Madison organization that provides a co-working space and networking opportunities for its members in an effort to encourage entrepreneurship and collaboration among them.
All of this year’s speakers have a connection to the Madison community and were selected using a variety of methods, including crowdsourcing for nominations from the public.
The conference included presentations ranging in topic from child development and finding one’s own authentic style, to diversifying communities and keeping the lakes clean. Each topic alluded to the greater theme of equity, according to TEDx Madison organizers Candace Stohs-Krause and Flora Zeng.
Zeng and Stohs-Krause, along with co-organizers Andrew Conley, Adam Braus and Josh Herritz, also helped host a networking event following TEDxMadison hoping to encourage attendees to continue the conversation and take action.
“There are all these great ideas shared, which is fine, but if you don’t really do anything about it or you don’t grow from it or take it and translate it into something else, then we’ve failed,” Stohs-Krause said.
Zeng said the main goal of TEDx Madison was to expose people to local “doers of deeds,” encouraging them to see new perspectives and inspiring them to think about the world around them.
“I think it’s really easy to get siloed in any community, but especially in the Midwest we’re all very nice and polite, we don’t [like] confrontation and ... I think sometimes it leads to conflict avoidance about issues that really need to be talked about,” Stohs-Krause added. “I think the TED platform is a really great way to start talking about those things and to have these community conversations that we maybe wouldn’t otherwise have.”
