TEDx localizes global conversations

Pop culture these days is akin to your great-aunt’s knitting bag: roomy enough to hold everything from "Dumb and Dumber" to "An Inconvenient Truth."

Whether we’re trending smarter is open to debate, but TED the brainiac talks and "Ted" the film with the raunchy talking bear do share something in common: They aim to entertain.

TED, a nonprofit organization founded in 1984, stands for technology, entertainment and design. Its tagline is "Ideas worth spreading," and when videos of its talks, such as "How schools kill creativity" and "Your body language shapes who you are," go viral, the mission is advanced.

In 2009, TED the global mother ship, headquartered in Canada, spawned offspring called TEDx, which provide local platforms for talks.

"The ‘x’ stands for independently organized, and Honolulu was one of the first to answer that call," said Genesis Leong, lead curator for TEDx Honolulu, which is holding its fifth conference Saturday at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "We’re aiming to really peer into local people, industries and ideas that we weren’t aware of. Even though Hawaii’s so small, we’re all in our bubbles."

The goal, Leong continued, is to "pop and merge those bubbles," exchanging new information with the local and global community "through conversations that can help make the world a better place." In between the conferences, TEDx Hono­lulu puts on smaller events, from cultural salons to student-organized events at schools, such as the April 4 "Sustainability of Us" TEDx Youth event at Punahou School.

This year’s conference theme is "Paradigm Shifts," which Leong explains as "the ‘aha!’ moment when you see things in a whole other perspective."

A call went out to audition speakers on that theme (all TEDx speakers and organizers are volunteers).

"My angle is going to be the need for us to change the conversation about sex," said Andrea Anderson, one of this year’s 12 speakers and the outgoing CEO of Planned Parenthood Hawaii.

She said she was raised in Minnesota by a family of Danish immigrants who viewed sexuality as a part of normal daily life, "like brushing your teeth, tying your shoes." Americans’ "shame-based" reluctance to discuss sex, whether as educators or with children and partners, "does the health of our communities and our children a huge disservice," she said.

Because sustainability is a constant driver, the "E" in TED could easily stand for "environment." How Hawaii’s unique situation can help solve the world’s energy problems will be explored by Dawn Lippert, director of the Energy Excelerator, which helps clean energy technologies get to market.

"The main issue in Hawaii is not getting solar on the grid, but how to add energy storage and a smart grid," Lippert said.

The paradigm shift element in her talk will be "how to align and add value with all the different players in an ecosystem," since energy touches all. Energy innovation will be further explored by Brandon Hayashi and Ian Monroe.

Rounding out the speakers’ roster will be Oceanit founder Patrick Sullivan, videographer Gabriel Yanagi­hara, artists Shane Robinson and Cheyne Gallarde, Go Farm Hawaii founder Steven Chiang, employment advocates Vicki Johnson and Jennifer Dotson, bicycle advocate Hayden Atkins, and writers Kimmy Takata, Joanne Liupaono and Sai Ako of "Voices from the Inside," a group of former inmates from the Oahu women’s prison who tell stories from behind its walls.

In addition to the talks, "a lot happens offstage as well, with interactive, hands-on booths for attendees to engage with our speakers," Leong said. A vegetarian lunch will be served and Sustainable Coastlines, a nonprofit group that sponsors beach cleanups and seeks to reduce waste, will "weigh everything from paper to food scraps so we know how much waste we produced and how much we recycled," Leong said.

Another resource that TEDx participants are invested in weighing, sharing and not wasting is words.