TED Prize Wish Revealed: The City 2.0

Last December, the 2012 TED Prize winner was officially announced, and for the first time in the history of the prize, not just a single person but a collaborative idea was being awarded: the City 2.0. This week, with the TED2012: Full Spectrum conference happening right now in Long Beach, California, the TED Prize Wish - "One Wish to Change the World" - has now also been revealed.

THE WISH:

I am the crucible of the future.
I am where humanity will either flourish or fade.
I am being built and rebuilt every day.
I am inevitable. But I am not yet determined.
I wish to be inclusive, innovative, healthy, soulful, thriving. But my potential can only be reached through you.

You can forge a new urban outlook. Begin by connecting. Imagine a platform that brings you together, locally and globally. Combine the reach of the cloud with the power of the crowd. Connect leaders, experts, companies, organizations and citizens. Share your tools, data, designs, successes, and ideas. Turn them into action.

Together you can:

• Bridge the gap between poor and rich communities.
• Spectacularly reduce your carbon footprint.
• Make nature part of daily life.
• Empower entrepreneurship.
• Re-imagine education.
• Nurture health.

I am the City 2.0. Dream me. Build me. Make me real.

THE PLAN:

The TED Prize will create a unique platform to allow citizens anywhere to participate in the creation of their City 2.0. The platform will excite, connect and empower individuals and communities around the world through editorial content (video and text), a shareable project database, tools for local connection, and resources for executing ideas. The result will be an ever-expanding network of citizen-led experiments, with the ability to scale successes and learn lessons from failures.

For phase I, the website (www.thecity2.org) will focus on helping individuals in forming cross-disciplinary groups to:

1. determine the issue they want to tackle (i.e. traffic, lack of trees);
2. determine a solution;
3. develop an action plan;
4. work to implement the solution;
5. share the story of their success or failure with others.

Companies and organizations will be able to offer their tools to site users for use in executing their action plans. Ten micro grants of $10,000, coming out of the $100,000 TED Prize money, will be awarded in July 2012 to ten local projects that have the best hope of spurring the creation of their City 2.0.

As the site continues to grow and the overall platform grows we expect to:

1. expand the functionality for individuals to connect and act;
2. develop and design templates for knowledge sharing between new ideas formulated on the site and preexisting projects;
3. build out our resource section with new local and global partners;
4. introduce technology solutions for non-web based communities;
5. expand our financial incentive program with larger grant offerings for active projects
6. establish local and/or global gatherings on the City 2.0.

THE NEEDS:

• Local individuals to form groups and begin activating around their city
• Editor(s)/researcher(s) to seek out great examples of what is working and tell those stories
• Photographers and videographers
• Companies and organizations willing to offer empowering resources
• Financial support
• Links/connections to local organizations working on cities
• Media campaign
• Media space
• Connections to governments and data sets
• Technology partners

QUESTIONS:

1. How do we turn a set of individual, local projects into the ultimate blueprint for The City 2.0?
2. What functionality and resources would best enable citizens to get active?
3. How do we best tell the stories of successful projects?
4. What is an innovative way to share knowledge to help activate local groups?

Join the initiative and register now at thecity2.org, and also watch videos of the TED2012 presenters on the TED blog.