Presenting ON at TED Global 2010

Last week, we were asked to inaugurate TED’s very first “partners” session on behalf of Orange. This was an absolutely awesome experience, as frankly, getting to present the thinking behind On at TED was a dream come true.

TED Global took place in Oxford, with some 800 attendees. After the gloom years, the focus was on the good news. The presentations on spreading education , in true TED style, were astounding, as were talks on decoding the brain, and applying video gaming (Tom Chatfield) behaviours to general motivation. Ralph Simons gave us an entertaining insight into My Sharona, while Annie Lennox got us all sweet dreaming again before reminding us of the topicality of the fight against AIDS. Naif Al-Mutuwa tought us the power of comics in fighting against stereo-typing Islam. Matt Ridley gave a compelling explanation of why progress accelerates. And I managed to miss (slight hangover) a brilliant appearance by Julian Assange on WikiLeaks.

And in all of this, what did we do?  Well, basically, we carried on our crusade for more human, more subtle, more pertinent communications with our mobiles.

Giles presenting at TED Global 2010 – © All Rights Reserved – James Duncan Davidson / TED

One of the points we made is that as social networking behaviours move into mainstream mobile conversations, there are a whole bunch of opportunities, but also of risks around identity, privacy and data ownership. We explored the importance of allowing people to be inconsistent (i.e. present multiple facets of their personalities to different groups), to forget (i.e. find ways to make sure that things do not move in an uncontrolled way into the social ether) and lastly the right to lie (or tell things to one group that you may not wish to share with others).

Lastly, we pointed out that as we carry on working on this, we are going to get lots wrong. So please join the conversation on this blog (or on Facebook and Twitter) and help us get it right.

The slide show and notes are visible below. Hopefully, one day, TED will release the video of the presentation on the prestigious TED.com website.  If and when this happens, we will let you know!

ON: Giles Corbett’s presentation at TED Global 2010 (see the PowerPoint version without the comments here).

Thanks to Addy Dugdale for her article about ON on Fast Company and to Michael May for choosing Giles as one of his TED favorite speakers!

You can follow Giles on Twitter at @GiCorb.