TEDx at the Kimmel: Where ideas go to mix

The idea, says Roz Duffy, organizer of TEDx Philadelphia, is simple: "Get a bunch of interesting people in the same room and see what happens."

"Good ideas can come from anywhere," says Emily McManus, editor of TED.com.

Such is the buzz behind TEDx - a high-powered idea swap meet coming to a sold-out Kimmel Center Thursday.

It's also a coming-out party of sorts for a town full of ferment in technology, entertainment, and design. To TEDx fans, it's exciting that TEDx is here. For them, its theme - Right Here, Right Now - suits this town, this time.

"I'm very happy Philly has a TEDx," says Richard Saul Wurman. Based in Rhode Island but Philly-born, he's one of the founders of TED (he sold it, or almost all of it, in 2002). "I'm also surprised Philadelphia is just now having one. Sometimes the train to the Main Line runs late."

The movement named TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) started in 1984. TEDs are big multidisciplinary gatherings featuring short talks (20 minutes max) by world thought leaders: Past speakers have included Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, primate scientist Jane Goodall, innovator Sir Richard Branson, animal-care theorist Temple Grandin, economist Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and author Isabel Allende.

A mostly leaderless, do-it-yourself aggregation of fresh thinkers, TED has become an Internet phenomenon and a cultural force. TED talks become podcasts on Ted.com, and millions have downloaded them - more than 10 million so far.

TEDx, an offshoot of TED, takes it local, takes it smaller. Independently organized, TEDx meetings - there will be more than 1,500 in the next 12 months worldwide, according to Wurman - bring in local schools, businesses, designers, scientists, performers. TEDx meetings took place this fall in Phoenixville, at the University of Pennsylvania, and at Pennsylvania State University.

And now it's Philly's turn. Stanford Thompson, professional trumpeter and director of the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra's Tune Up Philly program, will speak. So will Evan Malone, a businessman and leader in the "maker movement" in everything from electronics to metalworking.

Other speakers include engineer and educator Simon Hauger, urban photographer Zoe Strauss, chef Michael Solomonov, filmmaker Tanya Hamilton, poet/performance artist Ursula Rucker, and urbanologist Nic Esposito.

"We sold out very quickly, and could have sold many more tickets," says Ian Cross, a volunteer organizer and chief executive officer of I-SITE, a Web design and marketing firm in Old City. (About 575 tickets were sold for the daylong event, most for $75; some were subsidized.)

Duffy, a self-described "part of the tech community in Philly," got a license to organize TEDx here because, she says, "there's been so much collaborative momentum in this town the last 10 years. People are organizing in new and interesting ways more and more: start-ups, collaborative spaces, partnerships in Web design, the arts, and technology."

"What TEDx is all about," Cross says, "is like-mindedness" - a watchword of the movement. "It's raising awareness of all the incredible people we have in this area and getting them to brainstorm and innovate in all areas."

Speakers tend to be people who do things differently, cut across normal definitions, fields, and boundaries. Poets sit next to engineers; Web designers team with entrepreneurs; architects chum around with dancers.

Take Rucker. When asked what she does, she said, "I don't even know what to call it - I merge a lot of different worlds together, especially poetry with different music genres. I have sort of a combined street and intellectual socio-politico-cultural appeal."

When invited, she was surprised: "I was just sitting here, being a mother, living in Philly, and these folks call. But I said, 'Hey, it's in my city, it's cool, innovative, fresh.' "

Hauger started the afterschool program known as the West Philadelphia High School Academy of Automotive and Mechanical Engineering in 1998. There, he led students in designing "hybrids and other awesome cars," as he put it. Hauger-led teams of kids defeated more heralded brainiacs - think MIT - and went pretty far in competition for the $10 million X Prize, focused on designing and making a business plan to produce a 100-mile-a-gallon car.

What will Hauger talk about at TEDx?

"Education," he said. "Urban education is a disaster, and we stumbled on a way - and other people are doing this now, too - to engage kids in their own education: Give them a real project, a real problem to solve, like the hybrid car, and create a setting that lets them learn while solving it. It's not about the cars - the kids are the real result."

Cross said TEDx fits into a social movement a couple of decades old: "a growing number of do-it-yourself events and what has come out of them." Many such events come through Philadelphia.

BarCamp, an international series of workshops on Web applications, took place Saturday at the University of the Arts. In another set of events called Ignite, one of which was at Johnny Brenda's last month, each presenter, no matter the topic, gets no more than five minutes and 20 slides. Or at Pecha Kucha Nights - the next one is on New Year's Day at Studio 34 in West Philadelphia - presenters get 20 slides, 20 seconds each.

Cross-pollination, exchange, sharing. Strauss, who calls herself "just a lady living in South Philly," has become an acclaimed photographer of cityscapes and city people in only 10 years (she got her first camera in 2000). Her installation "I-95," which she'll talk about at TEDx, was originally installed underneath that august highway - one more example of thinking differently.

"I was not a TED person," Strauss said, "but it's an awesome concept." She also thinks Philadelphia is implicit in her work: "This place - in a way that's very hard to describe to someone who's not from here - pulls people together in idiosyncratic ways. Maybe that's why this conference is such a good idea.

"I could not have done this in any other city," Strauss says. "This place allows you to be out in the real world, and recording it, and nowhere else can you find such intensity, such support - grade schoolers, high schoolers, lesbian separatists, anarchists, my Republican neighbor up the block."

Although the Kimmel is sold out, true to its theme of sharing, TEDx will stream live on the Web at tedxphilly.com.

"But the social aspect of TEDx is really part of it," says Duffy. She recommends going to National Mechanics restaurant on 22 S. Third St., or to the Piazza at Schmidts, both of which will stream the event live. Like-mindedness may break out.