“TEDtoChina” is a significant visionary project in the Chinese free culture movement. Its practice is a testimony of several concepts and ideas, including Sharism, Creative Commons, Webridge, Open Brand, Social Professional Service, and Cloud Volunteers Management.
TED (technology, entertainment and design) is a conference, gathering the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers to disseminate their ideas. The “TEDtoChina” project was founded on October 25, 2008, as an independent TED tribute project that uses the TED logo with permission from TED.
Operating as a free culture project and an education project, “TEDtoChina” aims to distribute TED’s inspiring and enlightening ideas to China. We hope to foster citizen spirit that can be a force for good in local communities. Be part of the change is a resonant idea at TED—and we want to bring this idea to people through our coverage.
The “TEDtoChina” Chinese site covers TED talks, TED Conferences, TED Prize, TEDx, TED Fellows and the TED Open Translation Project. By March 2, 2009, the “TEDtoChina” Chinese site had published over 540 posts and received 121,040 visits and 337,290 page views from 549 cities in China and 106 countries around the world. In addition, it has inspired Chinese TED fans to form a local community to discuss TED-related topics and local social innovations.
As a daily publishing website, the “TEDtoChina” Chinese site has grown into an online hub of the TED phenomena in the Greater China area by supporting and reporting TEDx events, servicing TED Chinese translators and spreading TED Prize updated reports.
Our team is also active in organizing and supporting small TED-inspired offline group events. For example, we have held such events in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Xiamen in October 2009. The Shanghai “TEDtoChina” chapter also hosts biweekly book-club events related to TED presentations and speakers. We are working on the plan to organize offline events in over 20 cities in 2010.
We are in the process of building up version 2.0 of the “TEDtoChina” Chinese site by using the open-sources code from “1kg.org”, a social networking site, and building up the English version of “TEDtoChina” for the purpose of communicating TEDx China events to the global TED community.

Links: http://www.TEDtoChina.com

We started TEDtoChina back in October 2008 based on an idea from Tony Yet and Oliver Ding of broadcasting the TED message to the 1.3-billion-plus Chinese-speaking folks in the world. During the first stage (from October 2008 to August 2009), we invited friends to join the project. As of March 17, 2009, we have had seven site editors. After several months, we recognized the invitation model was ineffective with regard to the scale of the project. During the second stage (from August 2009 to November 2009), we publicly recruited volunteers. Over 25 writer volunteers have joined our project since then. We reorganized the publishing team and built five writing groups, including Monday@TEDtoChina, Tuesday@TEDtoChina, Wednesday@TEDto- China, Thursday@TEDtoChina, and Friday@TEDtoChina. Each group is led by a coordinator. Now in our third stage (from December 2009 to present), we are building a formal team structure.