TEDxPhiladelphia is Back: Theme and Date Announced for Spring 2014 Conference

After a two-year hiatus, TEDxPhiladelphia is back.

The theme of the 2014 one-day conference, announced earlier this week, is “The New Workshop of the World.”

“[The theme] is a play on a nickname that Philadelphia used to have which is ‘the Workshop of the World,’ which we were known as from the 1860s to the early 1970s because of our industrial history,” said Emaleigh Doley, organizer and producer for TEDxPhiladelphia.

“So we’re taking that as a jumping off point to really look at how this city is reclaiming itself as a place for innovation across all fields.”

That means the event will highlight speakers and performers in a city that is reemerging as a home for makers, entrepreneurs, artists as well as thinkers and doers.

TEDx events are local, self-organized speaker conferences based off the the global TED model. Previous events in Philadelphia include TEDxPhilly 2011: The City, TEDxPhilly 2010: Right Here, Right Now, and TEDxPhillyWomen 2010: A Livecast of TEDWomen. Some themes and topics of past talks include: architecture, urban design, public art, food access, and health – all with a Philly focus.

2011 TEDxPhilly speakers, Ethan Nguyen and Inga Saffron. 

“People should really explore our website, explore the talks and bios of past speakers,” Doley said. “We really want people to nominate other people who they’d love to hear speak or nominate themselves – that’s what’s going to make a great conference. It’s participatory from the ground up.”

Speaker nominations for the conference will be open until January 16th.

“The conference is very much informed by the speakers that we end up selecting,” Doley said. “So we’ll have discussion topics, for example, on the day of the conference, but we won’t really know those until we finalize the speakers and see how they fit together.”

The event will be held March 28th at the Temple Performing Arts Center, the same location where it was held in 2011. Tickets for TedxPhiladelphia will go on sale on December 16th.

More information, including the nomination form for speakers, can be found at tedxphiladelphia.org.

(All images courtesy of TEDxPhiladelphia)