Good Monday morning to you all, I hope that you had a great weekend and are looking forward to a rocking week. If you’re not and need a little motivation, inspiration and some food for thought, check out today’s post to learn about an initiative called TED, the local event held recently called TEDx Cape Town and watch the whole event right here for free.

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, is a global non-profit organisation dedicated to the mission of ‘ideas worth spreading.’ The “x” in TEDx Cape Town means it is an independently organised event, licensed by TED.

TEDx Cape Town 2012: “What we play is life.”

This weekend saw the 2nd (I think) TEDx Event take place at the Baxter theater. The theme for this year’s event was “What We Play is Life” – Famous jazz musician Louis Armstrong once said “what we play is life” and this quote inspired the theme for TEDxCapeTown 2012. It illustrates the light side of life and alludes to the fact that life is a game which we have to play and also implies that certain rules apply. How we choose to play the game and how well we perform is ultimately up to us.

Source: LiveStream.com

It may take some time and effort to locate the talks of the various speakers from the event schedule below as the file is not indexed, but once it’s buffered you can find your way around. Each guest gets around 18-20 minutes per presentation.

TEDx Cape Town 2012 Guest Speakers

Session 1: Uncover the Invisible

Alan Knott-Craig, Founder of World of Avatar, CEO of Mxit

Idea worth spreading: The impact of anonymity in low-income communities in South Africa, particularly as it applies to mobile social networks.

Shannon Royden-Turner, Urban Planner

Idea worth spreading: Question and highlight the role of informal settlements as assets within our cities. We need to move beyond a paradigm of eradication towards one of intervention, based on the current housing backlog, the rate of housing delivery and the way in which budgets are currently allocated.

Warren Nilsson, Social Innovation Researcher

Idea worth spreading: The biggest challenge the world is facing is not how to create change but how to sustain change, and if we want to sustain change we are mostly paying attention to the wrong things, particularly inside our social purpose organizations and social movements.

Sue Harrison, Bioprocess Engineer

Idea worth spreading: Sharing the potential for using integrated bioprocesses for conversion of a range of byproducts to commodity products, value added products and benign wastes using the underlying concepts of industrial ecology.

Winslow Schalkwyk, Performer/Producer/Poet

Idea worth spreading: Winslow downloads lessons, blessings and love into journeys through words and sounds and the power held between these two elements. Through a poem with the refrain “What we play is life” he will explore the inter-connectiveness of life and how, in this new social networking age, “life” takes on new meaning.

Session 2: Learn from Mistakes

Ulrike Rivett, Geomatics and ICT Action Researcher

Idea worth spreading: Building the ability to trust the water we drink. It’s about building confidence in governments delivering services. It’s about fighting our tendency to be depressed by all the “stuff ups” without coming up with a better solution. It’s about changing how we think.

Arthur Attwell, Book reinventor

Idea worth spreading: If we can just get over being precious and controlling about it – the publishing industry can put every book within walking distance of every home within four years. And it’ll hardly cost a thing.

Louise van Rhyn, Education Activist & Social Entrepreneur

Idea worth spreading: A radical innovation in the field of CSI, Education Reform and Leadership Development that creates opportunities for business leaders to make a significant difference to education whilst developing their leadership skills.

Monique Schiess, Incubator of creative projects, incl. AfrikaBurn

Idea worth spreading: Building snowballs of engagement and practicing imagining.

Chris Loker, Financial services consultant.

Idea worth spreading: Financial institutions should be in the background, enabling the real economy, not at the forefront as it is now. This transformation can only take place when individual savers and investors recognize their collective power and insist on greater accountability.

Peter Greenwall, Errorthoughtical Engineer

Idea worth spreading: Multiple types of failure can be upcycled into material for innovation.

Session 3: Free Your Mind

Mbali Vilakazi Poet, performer, creative facilitator

Idea worth spreading: The process of creating poetry has certain principles that can be adapted into systems of living. Through the act of re-creating how we use language, we are able to re-create our very lives – we are able to reframe our experience of it. It offers us the opportunity to process and navigate the world differently.

Justin R Melville Designer, intelletual capitalist

Idea worth spreading: Ways for you and I to shape the future of the music business by sharing experiences and supporting the stuff we love.

Lauren Gillis, Social Entrepreneur

Idea worth spreading: We can all create opportunities that change lives: sometimes by initiating the smallest things they can result in bigger outcomes.

Helene Smit, Facilitator

Idea worth spreading: Much behaviour is driven by the unconscious mind, individually and collectively. Helene’s work often involves facilitating people processes about issues that lie beneath the surface and need to be carefully brought into the conversation.

Surprise Guest

Session 4: Challenge Everything

Roderick Lim Banda, Independent consultant in Enterprise and Software Architecture

Idea worth spreading: The process of creating Software Factories in Africa. “What we Play is Life” is about a larger process at work of how we can harness our potential as a continent and as a people to overcome obstacles and negative perceptions.

Lara Foot-Newton, Playwright

Idea worth spreading: Theatre to promote honesty, telling stories to rewrite the plot of our lives

Martin Tai Lyhne Jensen, Interaction Designer

Idea worth spreading: Hitchhiking open technology towards local ingenuity. The true potential of technology is too great to be trapped within the imagination of technologists.

Tim Noakes, UCT Professor of Sports Science

Idea worth spreading: Cut through mainstream myths, control your discomfort, get into the pain to find the real issues, in order to pursue perfection. Don’t accept anything.

About TED

TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Started as a four-day conference in California 25 years ago, TED has grown to support those world-changing ideas with multiple initiatives. The annual TED Conference invites the world’s leading thinkers and doers to speak for 18 minutes. Their talks are then made available, free, at TED.com. TED speakers have included Bill Gates, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sir Richard Branson, Nandan Nilekani, Philippe Starck, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Isabel Allende and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

About TEDx

x = independently organized event In the spirit of “ideas worth spreading,” TED has created TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is called TEDxCapeTown where x = independently organized TED event. At TEDxCapeTown TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized.