TEDxKraków blog

Our next speaker believes that patriotism doesn’t have to be painful. That’s the motto Waldemar Domański has been promoting for the past ten years as the creator of “Singing Lessons” (“Lekcje Śpiewania”). The first such lesson took place on 11 November 2002 – a date most Poles will recognize as National Independence Day. The lessons are actually a series of meetings at Kraków’s Main Square, where the participants usually sing patriotic Polish songs, and have become vastly popular over the years. To date, over 250,000 people have taken part.

As a Kraków councilor and the director of the digital Library of Polish Songs, Waldemar is quite knowledgeable about both the nation’s history and its proud tradition of song, which according to him is the best medium for ideas. In 2007 he set up the Library, which now has over 60,000 records, including over 2,000 biographies of writers and their music, as well as the stories of bands and performers and the origins of the songs. The culmination of his activities led him to be named Kraków’s Man of the Year 2011 in a poll by the Gazeta Krakowska newspaper. For the past two years, Waldemar has also been running a project called the Małopolska Musicians List in cooperation with the City Council. Its aim is to revitalize the music market in the city, as well as to create a professional and accurate database of musicians, bands, orchestras and choirs performing in the region.

At this year’s TEDxKraków, Waldemar will speak about being a local leader and maker based on his experiences of working with municipal governments as well as other members of the community. People come from near and far to take part in the Singing Lessons, and they come away with an experience of social community and togetherness. Waldemar’s goal is to promote modern patriotism and community through songs and singing. As he says: “It doesn’t have to be all about suffering”.

If you can gather a lot of people around your idea, that means that you can attract social energy, which constantly circulates around the urban body. Another speaker of TEDxKraków 2013 compares this phenomenon to a swarm of insects that revolve around a particular purpose. Anna Nacher points out an interesting coincidence in nature: insects choose what they gather around and so do we. How does that happen? Why some initiatives gain great popularity with little or no promotion and others do not succeed despite expensive marketing and advertising?

Our speaker leads a nomadic life between the Carpathian Mountains, Krakow and the rest of Europe. She is addicted to the mountains, especially those over two thousand meters above sea level. Passion for nomadic life is reflected in her academic and artistic activity that resembles a constant journey between her many interests. Radio listeners will know the voice of Anna’s broadcast “The negatives of pop culture.” Experimental folk lovers – from Magic Carpathians CDs or concerts, which started our as a musical project created in 1998 with Marek Styczyński. Her students will know her from her classes on cyberculture, media theory, cultural studies, gender issues, anthropology and audio-visual concepts, as well as research of sound.

Anna is an assistant professor at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts at the Jagiellonian University and co-author of the research project titled “Urban Culture – nodes and flows.” She studied different forms of communication in the city’s social ecosystem as part of her research. As she says “the deeply hidden element of urban culture ” are the things that determine the atmosphere or magic of the city.

In her TEDxKraków talk, she’ll suggest new ways of thinking about communication within Kraków; rather than treating the audience as a scattered unit belonging to different categories based on age, education or identity, it is worth thinking about groups, nodes and associations, that are linked together in very complex networks. You can learn more about Anna’s work from her blog and also find her on Facebook and Twitter.

You have a few days before your presentation at the final round of the NASA competition and it turns out that the shipment with the most important element of your presentation, the robot, got lost by the courier. What do you do? Simple – you build another robot!

That is exactly what Adam Karcz and his colleagues did. They were the only European team to advance to the finale of the 2013 NASA Lunabotics Mining Competition. For their final presentation, all teams were to present their “lunar excavators” – robots capable to extract and move a 10kg Moon rock in only 10 minutes. It took an entire year for this Warsaw Polytechnic team to build the robot, called Husar, for this competition, but upon their arrival in Florida for the competition finale, it turned out that the courier delivered only one of two packages they shipped. The most important elements of the robot, the construction and most of the electronics, were unfortunately missing.

Faced with this tough reality, Adam and his team quickly decided that failure was not an option and decided to spend the next few days rebuilding the robot. The support for this team came from all over: the other contestants made their parts and tools available to them, the judges moved forward their presentation date, and all of the Kennedy Space Center cheered for them. And it worked – Adam’s team rebuilt Husar the robot. Even though they didn’t win the main prize, they were recognized for their work and received the Perseverance Award.

This was the last year for the international edition of NASA’s Lunabotics Competition. Starting in 2014, only American students will be able to participate. Team Husar, however, is not giving up and is thinking of organizing an international lunar robotics competition in Poland.

By the way, the missing package containing Husar, the robot, is nowhere to be found.