TEDxBaltimore: ‘ReWIRED’ theme challenges speakers to envision a more innovative Baltimore [STORIFY]

Update 1/28/13 2:10 p.m.: One other TEDxBaltimore event took place in May 2011. (And you can watch archived video footage of that event here.) A TEDx Community Experience event held in January 2011 was hosted by both TEDxMidAtlantic and TEDxBaltimore.
The crowd inside the Murphy Fine Arts Center at Morgan State University cheered wildly Friday morning as Jordan Evans donned a Baltimore Ravens baseball cap during his Skype call with TEDxBaltimore co-organizers Jennifer Gunner and Sarge Salman.
Evans, the engineering development and operations manager for the Mars Science Laboratory, was helping kick off Baltimore’s second TEDx conference straight from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

From 9:30 a.m. through 5 that evening, 19 different speakers and one orchestra composed of preschool-age and elementary and junior high school students presented on myriad topics. U.S. Congressman John Sarbanes spoke about how to take PAC money out of national politics. Lance Lucas shared his vision of a technologically-based workforce “pipeline” for unemployed people in Baltimore. Keimmie Booth, Western High School student and member of the RoboDoves, received a standing ovation after sharing her passion for building battling robots.
The day’s theme, “Baltimore ReWIRED,” challenged the speakers and those comprising the estimated 700-strong audience (definitive attendance numbers will be released this week) to think about how this city can reposition itself — and, perhaps, the port, the mills and the factories as well — to take advantage of the innovation economy of the 21st century.
You can watch a livestream of the entire conference here.
For a quicker recap of the day’s events, take a look at the Storify we’ve compiled of the day’s tweets.
//storify.com/ajzaleski/inaugural-tedxbaltimore-at-morgan-state-university.js[View the story “Inaugural TEDxBaltimore at Morgan State University” on Storify]