In a recent keynote at the One Young World Summit 2012, Fatima Bhutto spoke to a group of young “ambassadors” about the importance of collaboration in inspiring global change.

“Every woman in this room is powerful and every man in this room is powerful too,” Jessica Jackley says in a keynote at the One Young World Summit 2012, “[and] we have to be careful because sometimes that power goes unused.” This is especially true, she says, if you don’t believe in yourself and don’t believe in the potential of others. As the co-founder of the micro-loaning website KIVA explains, you can have the best ideas and tools at your disposal—but none of that matters in you don’t believe that you have the potential to make a change.

“People matter,” says leadership speaker Bill Strickland in a recent keynote. “People are assets, not liabilities…[and] it is all in the way that you treat people that drives performance and drives behavior.”

In this talk, TED Fellow and designer Anab Jain talks about “designing the new normal,” and explains how new technologies in design will drastically change the way we live.

Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India is an eye-opening look at 21st century India. In this talk he recently delivered in Pakistan, Deb shares his experiences researching the book, and explores the transformative power of participatory journalism.

Here’s Jian Ghomeshi, host of CBC Radio’s Q, talking about relationships in what he calls today’s “culture of acceleration.”

As human rights speaker Kenji Yoshino argues in this moving keynote, minority groups living in the United States are being forced to “cover” a specific part of their personality in order to fit in and get ahead.

Here’s negotiation speaker Misha Glouberman talking about the importance of finding unseen solutions when solving problems.

“We think about data as numbers,” big data speaker Jer Thorp says. “What we don’t think about, really, is what those numbers represent.” Regardless of how meaningless, or how confusing, data may seem, Thorp presents a very human way of looking at our digital footprints. “These are not numbers,” he argues, “they are parts of our lives.” 

In a recent keynote, Thorp, the Data Artist in Residence at The New York Times, explains that data and numbers are “recording our histories.” New technologies and digital devices have given us access to large quantities of data that, if we know how to analyze it, can tell us a great deal about who we are. Thorp is passionate about transforming this data into meaningful insights about society. Not only does he bring data to life on stage, he also combines art and science into beautiful big data installations. His “Cascade” project provides a stunning visual representation of the way we share information across social media. Further, the breakthrough software he created as part of the 9/11 memorial project was able to group victims by relationship—rather than arbitrarily organizing them in alphabetical order. His software-based work has been used across the world and his lectures humanize the influx of data that surrounds us every day to help us see the personal stories that exist within numbers.

Salman Rushdie explains why prose literature—more so than movies, television, and theater—has historically been, and continues to be, at the forefront of opposition to tyranny. Though literature can survive tyranny, the writers behind the ideas seldom do. The question becomes: how can imaginative artists continue to tell the stories of their time without being assaulted, jailed, or worse.