An hour before the doors opened, excited attendees collected on the sidewalks around the former Baptist Temple, many engrossed in hand-held tech. Buzz bounced among favored speakers: the bards from Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement, say, or SEPTA technologist Michael Zaleski, or Jennifer Pahlka, local director of Code for America, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that provides technology assistance to cities.
At 8:30 a.m., events manager Sean Rogers cried, "Open those doors and let people in!" Enthusiasm was at such a pitch that when host Chris Bartlett, executive director of the William Way Center, said, "Let me hear right now the warmest welcome that you can give to me," he visibly started at the roar.
Nutter quipped that he had never seen anyone so good at asking for applause for himself. But it wasn't for Bartlett himself so much as for TED.
TED has become so famous many don't know its letters once stood for Technology Entertainment Design. Fledged in 1984, TED is a "leaderless movement," a flea market of ideas, a creativity mall for visionaries, artists, tech masters, and everyone else, springing up from time to time throughout the world. Most important of all letters was that little x, floating like an exponent behind TED. X marks the fact that this was a locally produced discussion.
In the "Engage" segment, Jeffrey Brenner, a physician in Camden, devastatingly analyzed the U.S. health-care system and recounted his efforts to "bend the cost curve" down in his town. "Check back with us in a year," he said to cheers. Pahlka said the economic slump had forced cities to improve with less, making them more responsive, more eco-friendly, more productive systems, "better places to live."
