Introducing the TED Fellows

This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video from the talk in the coming weeks or months. Because I’m putting these posts together very quickly, I will get things wrong, will misspell names and bungle details. Please feel free to use the comments thread on this post to offer corrections. You may also want to follow the conference via Twitter or through other blogs tagged as TED2009 on Technorati.

Tom Reilly, TED’s community director, explains the TED Fellows program by telling the story of William Kamkwamba, a remarkable Malawian inventor whose genius came to light at the TED Africa conference. By building a windmill in his rural community, William announced his willingness to make and create to his community, and TED has helped amplify his incredible story to millions of people, through his TED talk, an appearance in the Wall Street Journal and a forthcoming book.

TED is introducing a major new initiative, TED Fellows, by inviting 40 people from developing nations to participate in TED Long Beach. The people invited are doers, makers and builders; most are polymaths. These are people 21-40 years old who’ve already done something unusual and impressive. And these are people with “moral imagination”, the power to imagine a better future. The goal is to give these fellows the tools they need to succeed – media training, connection with the TED community and whatever mentoring they’re able to gather from the people involved with the project.

The plan is to invite fifty people a year, then select a subset each year of senior fellows who will attend multiple conferences, and will ultimately give a TED talk to present their work.