Fireflies to light up the world
Here’s why we launched Fireflies
“TED is a global community, welcoming people from every discipline and culture who seek a deeper understanding of the world. We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world. On TED.com, we’re building a clearinghouse of free knowledge from the world’s most inspired thinkers — and a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other, both online and at TED and TEDx events around the world, all year long.” TED.
When we founded TEDxParisDauphine, we wanted to have an impact bigger than us on our friends, our university, Paris and, for the sake of the dream, on everything else that there is. To this end, we knew that our university put us in an ideal position, but we shared the same blocking feeling of powerlessness. Mix those three ingredients in a shaker and you’ll get a bitter cocktail of guilt with sham flavours.
But maybe our role wasn’t to do anything. We’re not a creators and it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’ll come later. In any case, others are. Take Maxime for instance. He founded his startup after having heard two strangers talking in the subway. Or Sarah! She tried out every Parisian movie theatres: it flipped her mind upside down as well as her future, leaving audit for cultural affairs. Maybe others are without knowing it yet.
In fact, it struck our mind: things happen when your ideas bump into others’ ones. The worst would be that they never meet. That’s what we wanted to build: a dating initiative for ideas seeking some contact. It already existed, but not in our university. With a lot of creativity, we called it TEDxParisDauphine.
Now, imagine. After 2 years, 2 conferences, 15 speakers, 30 members and more than 2000 followers, when an idea passes by, it’s 2045 encounters in less than a second. Don’t argue, this is it. Multiply it by the number of ideas that get through a conference : boom. Enough to get pink dating websites cheeks to blush.
2045 striking ideas should make some noise in your skull, but only for a second. After each conference, maybe you kept an echo of the percussion, some inspiring ideas which settled down for a moment in a corner of your head. Maybe this echo still sounds in you, and maybe it’ll get you to act or change; We fear it doesn’t.
That’s why we’re launching Fireflies. First, bringing ideas from the outside to broadcast them inside our university is just half of our job. Second, organising a conference makes sure that all those ideas meet but only once a year: it’s insufficient and we want dates between ideas to happen all year long. Finally, we think that our university’s students and professors have brilliant ideas waiting for a forum to light up the world.
Fireflies is a publication: a newspaper, a place where any individual from Dauphine or any TEDx member can publish an idea or a story as an article. Whether you’re a french or an international student, a professor, an alumni, a speaker, whether you prefer chocolate or vanilla, we’ll welcome your ideas. You just have to create a Medium account and send us here the link to your article. There’s just one rule : TED forbids us to talk about politics and religion.
On our side, we’ll ensure that your articles will be read. That implies three things : we commit ourselves to reading what you write, we keep the right to accept or reject your articles and we’ll do our best to market them, on Medium and among our community, with you.
And if enough fireflies swarm together in the same place, who knows, maybe we’ll see your lights from the moon.
