On April 20, Tbilisi Ivane Javakhishvili University hosts TEDx Tbilisi event. This annual event takes place in Georgia for the second time. TEDx Tbilisi is part of Ted nonprofit organization and part of the net of intellectual conferences and forums that promotes innovative and interesting ideas regarding life and different areas of society.
“At TED the world’s leading thinkers and doers are asked to talk about their lives for 18 minutes.” ‘Ideas Worthy of Spreading’ is the motto of TED. TED speakers were Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Elisabeth Gilbert, former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and others. This year TEDx Tbilisi event hosts Georgian speakers, people who achieved success in their lives and will share their ideas to the audience. David Gogichaishili, modern artist Natalia Pirtskhalava, Professor Donald Rayfield from the University of London are among them. TED is interested in creative, appealing ideas and people.
Sopho Balavadze, representative of the Bank of Georgia: “Finally we have TEDx Tbilisi representative of Ted in Georgia. TEDx represents TED in different countries of the world and it spreads the experience of TED throughout the world. It’s the second time, when Bank of Georgia financially supports the event of TEDx Tbilisi. It is platform where people exchange ideas with each other. If you visit ted.com once, you’ll become connected to it for your entire life.”
Meri Gabashvili, TEDx Tbilisi organizer: “We have the event of larger scale and more ambitions this year. We’ll have three times more guests and greater variety of speakers. We become more and more popular. We already have more than 35000 views on out videos and we are happy that we succeeded.”
Deborah Fairlamb, co-organizer and co-founder of TEDx Tbilisi: “It is very important that TED as franchise was brought to Georgia. It’s important to bring out ideas based on local reality, ideas that are interesting not only for Georgia but also for global community of TED and beyond. We will be live-streaming, which means that we will have bigger audience and when people watch the videos, it will bring awareness of what’s going on in Georgia. We want to thank our sponsors. Without their participation, it would be impossible to build our ideas.”
Brian McCotter: “TEDx process is completely voluntary. There is an important intellectual basis in Georgia. Next year we’ll arrange the third event; in the Caucasus there is no other intellectual environment like Georgia and it’s a unique phenomenon.”
This year, the topic of TEDx Tbilisi 2013 is crossroads. “This is the turning point in life, when you decide which way to go – the moment of taking important decision. We think this theme is topical for Georgia not only from the political point of view but considering many other issues too. Our speakers will try to present very important topic in a limitef time period, which will make their presentation more interesting,” Meri Gabashvili said at the press conference of TEDx Tbilisi 2013, which was held in main office of the Bank of Georgia.