TEDxWestlake - July 12, 2012 Our first TEDxWestlake explored the accelerating change in the world around us. This change is largely driven by the power of the digital infrastructure built over the last few decades. William Gibson has remarked: "The future is already here -- it's just unevenly distributed." While we can't predict the future, we tried to uncover and mine some of these veins. We were lucky to have speakers from a wide array of disciplines, from kinetic art to philosophy to hybrid social ventures, to come share their stories with our audience of business students and innovators, and help us wonder about what might lie ahead. Diane Mars is a Master of Public Administration Candidate at the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. She has wide-ranging project management experience in San Francisco, New York, and Hong Kong. She has held editorial and marketing positions at higher education publishers John Wiley & Sons and Cengage Learning, legal support roles at the law firm Sedgwick and California Superior Court, Alameda County, and volunteer and pro bono civil society building roles at refugee and veteran service nonprofits. Diane possesses a B.A. in English from University of California, Berkeley. She is enthusiastic about federal policy, international relations, collaborative partnerships, and she likes imagining a more humane world. In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.