User:Karim2k/BIL Conference

Presentation
Most of you have heard of TED or watched the talks online, but do you know about BIL, the quirky, populist, unconference taking place nearby? Open to the public and fully participant powered, BIL features a wild mix of technologists, scientists, artists, hackers, and those with a passion for community awareness.

BIL emerged from a community of people who aspire to change the world for the better- everyone is on equal standing and we meet to share ideas, problems that need solving, and discoveries we are excited about with a quite diverse national and international crowd. Our attendees are our speakers and our speakers are our attendees and in true unconference style, attendees are responsible for shaping the conference itself through their participation.

In short, BIL is an open, self-organizing, emergent, arts, science, society and technology unconference held near the famous TED Conference during the trailing weekend of.

History and roots
The concept of the BIL Conference started in late November 2007, when Cody Marx Bailey proposed the idea of going out to Monterey, CA and crashing the TED Conference to Todd Huffman and Bill Erickson. The idea was to simply get a group of people to make the pilgrimage and hang around the area the TED’sters would be schmoozing at night. As the group quickly snowballed from a handful of people to nearly thirty in a matter of weeks, the decision to hold our own unconference seemed, well, obvious. Todd Huffman and Reichart von Wolfsheild proposed the name BIL, as it was catchy, short and best of all, unclaimed. It also had a bit of comedic value to take away some of the seriousness as it referenced the most excellent Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Most of the planning was done through the open-to-the-public wiki hosted by PBWiki. This allowed anyone interested in making something cool happen able to contribute. Soon, Alexis Bright, Tyler Emerson (along with the Singularity Institute), Emi Joy, and Simone Syed would begin to play a major part as the potetial attendance neared closer and closer to the fire marshalls limit on the space that was reserved. The week of TED 2008, the number of RSVPs had eclipsed the space limitations and the group was forced to spread the word that we could not take in any more attendees. BIL at that point had grown larger than anyone had expected. BIL 2009 was held on the campus of California State University at Long Beach and with over 100 speakers and 500 participants, doubling the size the previous year.