Two major events loomed large for the TEDxJakarta curatorial team as we began to think about this year’s event. First, were the earthquakes and tsunami that hit Palu, Sulawesi in September 2018. Second, was the challenging situation for Indonesian people with the general election in April 2019.
Those two events left Indonesians with questions. Would it be possible for us to save ourselves from natural disasters? Most areas in Indonesia are at risk of a tsunami, not to mention that our country has more volcanoes than almost any other. Would the Indonesia government move toward substantive improvement after the election? Would we, as an individuals, live a better life? Would we have more freedom under the new government?
We chose the theme Ribut/Reboot this year. Coming from two words from different languages with same homophone, Ribut in Bahasa Indonesia means noise or chaos; Reboot in English means to switch off and start again. TEDxJakarta: Ribut/Reboot invited 10 speakers from various backgrounds to share ideas about natural disasters, politics, society, culture, and history.
Some of the speakers to highlight are Ahmad Arif, Grace Natalie, and Widharmika Agung. Journalist Ahmad Arif focuses on natural disaster literacy. From his talk, we learned that to solve the social issue of saving ourselves from tsunami, we should dig deeper into our history, culture, folklore, and architecture. “It’s not a natural disaster that killed people,” said Arif. “It’s our ignorance of our own history and culture.” Grace Natalie shared the idea of what if citizens could ‘rate’ politicians, just like we rate our Uber drivers. Social entrepreneur Widharmika Agung shared that simple acts of volunteerism could help us make the world a better place and solve many social issues, from education to climate change.
Celebrating our 10th anniversary, we expanded our community with TEDx Skoll Conversations and TEDx Southeast Asia Regional Workshop, thanks to a partnership between TED and the Skoll Foundation. The TEDx Skoll Conversations series came to four cities this year: Lagos, Chengdu, Bogota, and included our community in Jakarta. It was a great opportunity to get to know more about social issues and entrepreneurial solutions from Skoll Awardees, to get know Skoll Foundation’s network and program further, and how to collaborate in the near future within the region.
TEDx Skoll Conversations featured Silverius Oscar Unggul from Telapak, Rachmad Hidayat from Water.org, and Sumitra Pasupathy from Ashoka in Southeast Asia region. Takeaways from this program showed the importance of the issues, but most importantly the need to come up with solutions to create good in society, build mechanisms that can work at the grassroots to solve social issues, the value of embracing community (we can’t go alone), and the importance of putting young people in charge to create long-term change.
TEDx Southeast Asia Regional Workshop was a great chance for TEDx organizers and team members to gather and learn from each other about some specific areas such as understanding TEDx guidelines, partnerships, speakers selections, audience experience, and filming TEDx talks. There were 60 people who had come from many parts of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.
It was a great weekend indeed for us, TEDxJakarta and TEDx communities in Southeast Asia region, not only to learn about ideas worth spreading, but also to better understand the social entrepreneurship ecosystem and how to build each of our TEDx communities further.
Images: Raras Gita / TEDxJakarta
