It has been an amazing fifteen years (even with COVID in the midst!) for TEDxCalgary as an organizing team.

A journey of X = Exploration

We're often asked what the "X" in TEDx is supposed to stand for. To TEDx, it means "an independently organized event". To us, it has always marked the treasured spot where idea explorers gather.

When we were granted our first licence in 2009, and planned our first event for April 2010, the number of global TEDx licencees was in the hundreds and collectively we were very much an experiment for the TED organization. Along with others in our city and across the globe, we were given the amazing latitude by TEDx to explore and multiply, and we now number in the thousands of organizing teams internationally. Big or small, new or old, every one of those teams is doing an inspiring job of finding voices that matter to our time and place in history, and being creative in how they engage their participants.

We feel very honoured to be part of how the TEDx program is helping organizers like us to bring the energy of amazing ideas to our local cities, and allowing us to showcase the many ideas that are hidden in our own back yard.

Cultivating a Garden of Ideas. Nurturing a Culture of Conversation.

We continuously seek to cultivate a rich and diverse garden of ideas, and help that grow by nuturing a culture of conversation based on the principles of pluralism and active community engagement as members of civil society. You can read more about our vision and purpose as a team, and we always welcome you to join us as a volunteer in whatever capacity fits.

As a team, we have long embraced and used the metaphor of "campfire conversations": those delightful, relaxed moments that let our minds shift gears and go to new places of insight and understanding as we watch the flames dance and sparks fly.

That view has always informed our programming. On an ongoing basis throughout the year, we'll be experimenting with campfire-inspired conversations across the city, both organized by us and in collaboration with others who share the perspective that campfires and the conversations that take place around them are an essential part of our deepest human connections. They allow us to exchange meaningful stories and play even more nimbly and creatively with ideas that we desperately need to share with one another in a society that is simultaneously the most and the least connected in our human history.

As always, none of the past decade would have been possible without the energy and intellect of our tremendous team of volunteers, our speakers, and our community partners. We owe all of them a profound debt of gratitude for having believed in our efforts, and supported us at every turn.

Join us on our journey to FLOW... Stay tuned to our events pages and social media channels, and be part of the conversation. 

– Rahim Sajan and Jonathan Perkins, co-founders and co-curators

What are we all about as a TEDx organizing team?

You'll find many types of TEDx events across the globe, ranging from small 100-person events (where we all start as new licencees) to ones with several thousand participants. From where we began in 2009, when there were just a few hundred organizing teams globally at the time, there are now over 3,000 TEDx organizers applying their collective intellect and passion to spreading amazing ideas.

Shortly after we began organizing, we made a decision that our main focus would always be to stay under 500 participants for any single event.

Why?

Our purpose has long been to cultivate a garden of ideas, and nurture a culture of conversation*. That takes a level of intimacy that we just didn't think can happen with larger events. It's still one of our core values: we want to get to know the people who participate in our events, making new and hopefully lasting connections with others in our community who are equally curious about the world around us.

During our more than a decade of operating, we've continued to experiment with different ways to achieve that vision. Since 2017, we've focused on offering smaller speaker-based salon events focused on questions that we think are important to explore more deeply, with audiences ranging from 50-120 people. The emphasis in those events is connecting as people, and spending time sharing ideas with one another in a more meaningful way.

Even at our main annual events, where we've hosted over 400 participants each year for the last several years, our approach has always been to balance the ideas coming from the stage with the opportunity for participants to interact with one another and key ideas in a personalized way as part of our deeply immersive interactions zone.

Join our "campfire" of conversation...

We've long held a belief that humans have most openly shared their ideas around the literal or metaphorical "campfire", when our thoughts more naturally seem to turn to deeper questions of meaning and purpose, and we're more willing to open ourselves up to deeper conversations. To us, those are the moments that truly connect us as fellow humans travelling together on the journey through life. If we let them, they allow us to more deeply understand and appreciate our collective responsibility to be better citizens of our local, national, and global communities. Our events over the last decade have shown our continuing concern for how we're doing as a species, and how we can aspire to do even better when it comes to how we relate to our natural environments, and to one another.

In our 2024 programming, we're exploring the theme of FLOW: Connecting the Dots. Flow is about the place where peak performance and creativity occur, as we focus on mastery in our ideas or our actions. It is a celebration of our fifteenth year of operations (and that of TEDx itself!) by connecting the dots across the many fascinating people and organizations that are sharing amazing and profound ideas in our local community. Throughout the programming year, we'll hold a number of different types of events, at different sizes and scales, to engage as many of those community Visionary Ideas Promoters (our favourite VIPs) as we possibly can.

Whether it's at one of our speaker salons, an adventure within the community, a community campfire event, or our main annual event, we hope we'll see you at some point in our programming year. 

Guiding Principles

One of our commitments as an organizing team is to help bring focus and attention to the 2030 Agenda of Sustainable Development Goals. As a program of unified actions, we believe that the global UN community has it right: these are valid goals for all of us, however we choose to prioritize them in our national or local context. Click on the image or link to learn more.

Another guiding principle is our commitment to pluralism, both as a Canadian-based organizing team and as a connected group of citizens within our local community. We're proud to cite the definition put forward by the Global Centre for Pluralism (it's Canadian too!), as follows:

Defined simply, pluralism is an ethic of respect for diversity. Whereas diversity is a fact, pluralism is a choice. Pluralism results from the daily decisions taken by state institutions, by civil society actors and associations and by individuals to recognize and value human differences.

* Our eternal thanks to long-time team member Cameron Falkenhagen for putting this into words.

Special TEDxCalgary Adventures

In our ten years of organizing TEDx events, we've been honoured to record over 140 talks and performances by an incredibly diverse and truly amazing set of speakers and musicians. To view the talks in their original event context, visit our TEDxCalgary YouTube channel, where talks are organized into playlists by event.

To browse our completed events, please see the Past Events page, which includes links to individual playlists of the event talks, arranged in the order in which speakers appeared. For more recent events, please see our Speakers page to view individual speaker bios, and their embedded talks once they are available.

Have a question about any of the talks? Contact our events team!

IN MEMORIUM

This page is dedicated to the memory of four of our speakers who have passed away since their talks. We honour:

Lauren Voisin (pictured, "Signal vs Noise", 2017), whose brilliant life among us was all too short

Cheri Macauley ("City 2.0", 2012)

Glenda MacQueen ("Wilderness", 2014)

Ken Low ("Humanity 3.0", 2010 and "Origins" Salon, 2017)

May their ideas always live on among us.

Read our story, People passing. Ideas living on.