Our final session, Making Makers, is starting with a surprise guest, Ralph Talmont, who thinks Poland is seen as an unfriendly and pessimistic nation. Now, we can either deny this, or do something about it – but how? Well, it will take a lot of effort, but it is worth doing for several reasons. Smiling is not only good for the health, it’s good for business, because friendly people are seen as more trustworthy, thus get more work in a virtuous cycle. The good news is, you don’t need a reason to be happy. Happiness can come first, and success will follow.

Up next is Agnieszka Stach, one of our youngest speakers today, whose aim is to make the law understandable to the layperson. It all started when she was a law student and was getting fed up with all of her friends constantly asking her for legal advice (for free, no less). She decided to make an algorithm for dealing with everyday legal questions people face. And then she made another… and another. Eventually, she combined her passion for music with law and began writing about intellectual property in a way that artists could use. From this she learned that any specialist knowledge you have is worth sharing, even if you’re just a lowly law student.

Three years ago, Michał Żołnowski, a doctor by day and astroid hunter/astrophotographer by night, was sick of the less than ideal conditions of his Krakow-based observatory and decided to build one in the Italian Alps. Of course, you don’t order an observatory on eBay – you have to build it, piece by piece, which in his case took months of hard work. Once his observatory was built, he set about an even harder task: finding asteroids, otherwise known as the tiny barely visible rocks flying through the night sky, generally obscured by starlight, but nevertheless perfectly capable of wiping out existence as we know it. Together with an astronomer partner, they decided to look at parts of the sky the big telescopes were missing, and so far have found 107 asteroids – one of which will soon be named TEDxKraków!

Wow, we’re at our last speaker already… how quickly it went by (probably because we were having so much fun).

Gever Tulley believes children should be respected and trusted with all matters of objects most modern parents would find “too dangerous” for them. Just like there are negative experiences children may have that damage them as adults, kids can have positive experiences that influence them throughout their entire lives. Gever himself had such an experience, mostly because he was largely left to his own devices as a child and soon was teaching himself code, working on an Apple II and coding medical equipment by the age of 16. Some time later, he made “the best mistake of his life” – imagining a hypothetical summer camp where children were expected to be competent and build real things. Thus began the Tinkering School, and he’s been encouraging kids to play with power tools ever since.

First up, journalist and human rights campaigner Steve Crawshaw talks about the impossible coming true, based on his own residency in Poland in the 80s, where he witnessed the achievements of Solidarity up close. Back then, without our benefit of hindsight, what Wałęsa and Solidarity were up against seemed impossible. And yet, even once martial law came in and tanks were rolling down the streets of Warsaw, small and large acts of defiance of courage and mischief continued – and worked! “Fear turned to euphoria” as the regime backed down due to the sheer strength of the individuals who came out to protest. This pattern continued throughout the Soviet Bloc, until the fall of the Berlin Wall was nothing but inevitable. This example has been repeated over and over throughout history and around the world, from Burma to China and the Middle East.

The next speaker, Waldemar Domański, could just be one of those people who bring about change through small acts of resistance that Steve described. His medium is song, a way of bringing rhythm and discipline to an idea, in this case patriotism and celebrating historical events in a less depressing way than was the case in Poland. It’s also a good way to introduce humor in other aspects of daily life, such as dealing with the Polish railway system or city bureaucracy. Oh, and most importantly: don’t waste time with the administration! Just do something worth doing and the funding will come…

Roger Antonsen loves science. However, grade school made him hate science and mathematics, and it wasn’t until he began studying logic in college that his love was reborn. That was when he realized that mathematics is not just doing equations, it’s communicating through symbols – finding simple rules that describe complex behavior. Since then, his mission has been to communicate this understanding of math to others, through telling stories and making science and math fascinating, relevant and interactive.

Finally, Janusz Makuch began his adventure with Jewish culture due simply to an overwhelming desire to do something – anything. The Krakow Jewish Culture Festival is a mirror held up to Janusz as much as to Jewish culture, and as he says, “I am the festival, the festival is me”. Because he was born in this strange country obsessed with history, full of myths and stereotypes and Rabbis and anti-Semitites and scholars and heretics, a country built in part by Jews but whose Jews were all but gone after the Second World War, this goy has also been the director of the world’s largest Jewish festival in the world for 25 years – and Kraków is the only place where this is not only possible, but probable.