TED’s pretty much wrapped up, but there are a ton of projects to come out of the talks, including those started by the winners of the TED Prize. Created as a way of taking the inspiration, ideas and resources that are generated at TED and using them to make a difference, the winners are given a wish, $100,000 and the talent of other TED attendees and the online community to make it happen.

Last year, former president Bill Clinton, photographer James Nachtwey and biologist EO Wilson received the TED Prize resulting in help developing “high quality rural health system for the whole country” of Rwanda, help in reporting and spreading “a story that the world needs to know about” related to public health, and the development of the first version of the Encyclopedia of Life.

This year’s TED Prize winners are writer David Eggers, physicist Neil Turok, and religious scholar Karen Armstrong.

Eggers is the founder of San Francisco 826Valencia, a very successful writing and tutoring lab for young people from the neighborhood, which has since been cloned in five other American cities.

David’s wish– to take the educational project further.

“empowering a child with writing is the essence of democracy”. He asks the conference’s attendees — and anyone else who’s in a position to help — to “find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area” and then share the story of their involvement on the OnceUponASchool website, hoping in their inspirational effect to start a virtuous cycle, “so that within a year we have 1000 examples of transformative partnerships”.

The newly live site offers ideas for ways to get involved, like helping a school develop a web presence (a site, podcasts, etc.), building a tutoring center yourself, or hiring a classroom for work experience. It also offers guidelines for partnering with schools, easy ways to finding a school near you, provides a space for receiving people’s pledges and stories of involvement.

Neil Turok is a South-African born physicist at Cambridge, a close collaborator of Stephen Hawking (with whom he speculated and infinite universe in which the Big Bang wasn’t the first nor last), and the founder of the African institute for mathematical sciences (AIMS).

Neil’s wish — Help me, he says, make sure that the next Einstein will be African, by “unlocking and nurturing scientific talent” across the continent, because The only people who can fix Africa are talented young Africans”.

According to TED, he plans “to build 15 centers of excellence across Africa, possibly modeled on AIMS but specialized in different areas of science, recruiting outstanding students and teachers, developing fellowship and entrepreneurship programs, attracting both private and public support, etc. Turok plans to start with Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda and Madagascar; he has already obtained political support, and local scientists will be leading the way. “The institutes have to be relevant, innovative, cost-effective, and high quality, because we want Africa to be rich.”

Karen Armstrong is a religious thinker and former nun who has written more than 20 books on faith and the major religions.

In each of the major world’s faiths, compassion is not only the test of any true religiosity, also the way to get into the presence of the divinity. In compassion we remove ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there. Every major tradition has put at its core a “golden rule”: do not do to others what you do not want be done to you.

The traditions also insisted that you could not and must not confine your compassion to your own group. You must have concern for everybody. Love your enemies. Honor the stranger. We formed you into tribes and nations so that you may know one another, says the Koran. There is also a great deal of religious illiteracy. People seem to equate faith with “believing things”, and very often secondary goals get pushed into first place instead of the golden rule, compassion, because the golden rule is difficult. A lot of religious people prefer to be right, rather than compassionate.
It seems to me that our current situation is so serious that any ideology that doesn’t promote a sense of global understanding and global appreciation of each other is failing the test of the time. The golden rule should be applied globally, we should not treat other nations in ways that we would not like to be treated ourselves. It’s time that we move beyond the idea of toleration, and towards appreciation of the other.

Karen’s wish–help me, she asked, “with the creation, launch and propagation of a Charter for Compassion”, to be crafted by a group of twelve inspirational thinkers from the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and “based on the fundamental principles of universal justice and respect”.

According to TED, “Bridging the divide among the three prevalent monotheistic faiths…will require a call for the creation of a totally new narrative, stepping beyond hatred and defensiveness and, in Armstrong’s own words, ‘making the authentic voice of religion a power in the world that is conducive to peace’. It will necessitate operational support (which will come from the UN Alliance of Civilizations, but also from individuals). Mostly, it will depend on the participation of many and on finding the right answer to the key question: Who are the spiritual leaders of these three religions who should be solicited to participate in the group of twelve?”

Wanna Help?

Each project is ambitious in its own way (we’d expect nothing less from TED) but world changing ideas can always use some help going from ideas to reality. There are a planned list of needs and discussion boards for each project asking for everything from server hosting, marketing partners/plans and websites, to nominations of spiritual leaders. So check out the TED Prize site for more info on the projects/winners and to offer your skills.

The videos of today’s three TED Prize speeches will be released on TED.com.