TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this years TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize. The annual conferences in Long Beach and Oxford bring together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 450 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks feature closed captions in English, and many feature subtitles in various languages.

What makes TEDxFlanders different?

We strive for the largest possible TEDx event because we think it is our duty to help spread the ideas of our talks to the largest number of people possible, not because we want a big venue… But we want to expand while preserving our vision of how our TEDxFlanders venues should be: Quality over Quantity: if a talk or content isn’t good enough, fresh enough, true enough, just skip it. Our events are free, with no entrance fee. It is our job to have enough supporting brands and companies that want to share the ideas with their network. TEDxFlanders is open to all supporters of great ideas, no matter what their monetary capabilities. We want to incorporate surprise and experiments. We are always in beta: we keep on daring to setup people and content that hold great ideas, even if a talk was never held before, or the idea-owner never set foot on a stage before,… We want to create opportunities, not certainties.

The core team

A relentless group of volunteers brought together by the 4 C’s: Coincidence, Collaboration and Christophe Cop. Long bio’s are superfluous. We are – in random order – : Denis, Thomas, Lisbeth, Vincent, Wouter, Eric, Hans, Dette, Elke, Eric and Michael. Other considerable contributors: Chris, Ianka, Jan, Hans, Roel, Joeri, Cyriel, Hilde, Karina, Colin, Martine, Lars and Katia. Try to meet them: they’re wonderful people.