Salon des Refuse, only friendlier: BIL & TED
As TED quickly becomes an establishment kind of thing, it now seems inevitable (I think I’ve used an inevitable construction twice today and I’ve only been awake for 1.5 hours!), that there would be a response.
BIL loves TED. TED is a great place to sit and listen to interesting ideas. Many of those ideas make it online, and millions get to experience them.
The catch for many of us is that TED is $6,000, which is too expensive for most people, including a great number with good ideas worth spreading. BIL has been created as a free space for people with ideas to come together and share them.
Our event is self-organizing, emergent, and anarchic. Nobody is in charge. If you want to come just show up
I’m not enough of a fan of crowds to find the ‘just show up’ part of it appealing, but I like the Salon-Salon des Refuses dynamic appealing. As an emerging business with sponsors, TED has accountabilities that can drive the mix and tenor of the speakers. But it’s still a wonderful thing to be celebrating the art of speaking, the theater of presentation and the generalist/renaissance reach for new ideas. Which is why BIL bills itself as a “perfect match to TED.” (I wonder how much time went into that: it could have been a perfect match for TED, or a counterpart to TED, or a foil, but they went with the slightly clumsier “match to”.)