Sarah Gelbard is one of the participants in the TEDx conference.
TEDxElginSt aims to bring together Ottawa’s creative community through inspiration, networking and a lot of talking with a conference at the Canadian Museum of Nature next month.
The March 29 conference is one of the many TEDx events that take place around the world, including Ottawa.
Though licensed by the organization TED and inspired by the popular TED Talks in which creative types give short, inspiring speeches, TEDx events are independent and specific to the community they take place in.
For TEDxElginSt, that community is downtown Ottawa.
It is not the first TEDx event to take place in the city, but it is the first to focus so heavily on the city’s urban core.
The organizers chose Elgin Street for the name because it bridges the different elements of downtown.
“We saw Elgin Street as kind of a symbolic dividing line,” says Erin Gee, the conference’s co-ordinator.
This line cuts through residences and the business district on the west side, the Byward Market on the east side, Parliament Hill to the north, and arts and culture in the south, she explains.
“I think that a lot of people view Ottawa as being boring because it is a smaller city,” says Gee.
“I think that its important for people to see all the things that Ottawa has to offer.”
Some examples of these things available in the city are the speakers the conference organizers have lined up for TEDxElginSt, says Gee.
“I’m among pretty great company at this conference,” said Stephanie Vincente, editor-in-chief of Herd Magazine and one of the conference’s speakers, in an e-mail
Vincente’s talk aims to “psychoanalyze Ottawa, as though it were a troubled teen, and consequently leave everyone with some insights and questions about what identity really is, especially to a city whose identity is in question daily,” she said
Though the speakers will cover topics that range from solar energy to social networking in the public service, they are all meant to be relevant in some way to the conference’s theme, “Rethink Rebuild.”
“(The theme) is not about starting from scratch,” says Sarah Gelbard, another of the conference’s speakers.
“It’s really about starting with what’s there and trying to make things that build upon what’s there, tweaking it a little bit and seeing what happens.”
Gelbard is an architectural theorist, scholar and designer based in Ottawa.
She says her talk fits perfectly with the theme of “Rethink, Rebuild.”
“I’m organizing it around the theme of appropriation and appreciation of public space and just sort of bringing together some of the design work I’ve done, some of the experiments and then also have a bit of the theory behind it,” says Gelbard.
People wishing to attend the full day conference must apply online by Feb. 21.
Organizers will choose the attendees and inform them by March 2.
They will then have one week to purchase their tickets.
“We want people who are open-minded, who are interested in meeting new people and really just looking to benefit personally from the experience and possibly, hopefully, translate that back into our community,” says Gee.