Yes, it wasn't so much geographic as it was cross-disciplinary. TED is all about cross-fertilization. For example there was a really great presentation [by Manuel Lima] which was looking at visual ways of presenting data. It was a really interesting example of hybridization, again, not across geographies, but across, almost, modalities of expression.
The other thing I tried to do, I was there to also catalyze some of these connections. So, for example, one of the Fellows [Gabriella Gómez-Mont] runs an arts cultural center in Mexico City, and I have a friend who does something very similar in Cairo. And again, a lot of what they're trying to achieve, both in Mexico City and Cairo, are actually quite similar in terms of both fostering young artists, but also creating a sense of community around the arts in a place which has a lot of urban stresses and a lot of the pressures of an urban space in the developing world. So I've put them in contact as well. I see myself more as a catalyst for hybridization, trying to get some of these reactions going.
The wonderful presentation [by Manuel Lima] about 3D visualization was how to take complex data and put in visual form. And really what he was doing, it was a form of hybridization. It was working from the world of numbers and facts and figures and statistics, and finding a creative way to present that visually, which also not only makes it more accessible, but actually draws out more information because when you present that sort of dense data in a new way, you also start to see new connections between pieces of data that you might not have seen if you just saw them as numbers on a page. And I thought that was a very interesting example of what I would consider to be hybridization.
So TED was a really wonderful experience. I'm sure it's great going as a delegate, but certainly going as a Fellow was also very, very interesting because you had more time to interact with this incredibly interesting group of people. That was a bonus as well.