LONG BEACH – It’s never long at the annual
TED conference before attendees feel awash in mind-bending, technology-enabled ideas -- a theory that there are multiple universes, a robotic drone that is an exact replica of a hummingbird, and a demonstration of the wisdom of the crowd: a request for online guesses from the 5,000-plus attendees of the weight of an ox brought onstage, the average of which was 1,793 pounds. The beast’s weight: 1,795 lbs. So it was fitting that the official announcement of the TED Prize 2012,
The City 2.0, revealed a kind of global Wikipedia connecting citizens, political leaders, urban experts, companies, and organizations, with the goal of improving the 21st century city using up-to-the-minute crowdsourcing techniques. The ambitious goal is to create a clearinghouse for tools and methodologies and best practices to reshape cities around the world. “This has been designed as a big collaborative process – not us deciding who’s in and who’s out,” said TED curator Chris Anderson, who described the new platform, at
this website, as a “big open tent” to collect and share successes, resources, and insights.
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