Last Saturday at 10am, hundreds of people gathered at the AGBU building in Yerevan. If you’ve ever been to Armenia, you know that’s crazy early for a weekday, let alone a Saturday morning. Despite the time, however, there was a huge turnout for Yerevan’s first TEDx Salon of 2016.

A politician, a UN rep and a comedian walk into a bar….

This year’s event was organized jointly by the TEDxYerevan team and UNDP Armenia, so naturally most of the talks revolved around development, but also touched upon the interaction between governments and citizens, ethics and education.

Claire Medina, Deputy Resident Representative of UNDP in Armenia, talked about how technology can enable citizens to take on a more active role in society, and about crowdsourcing ideas to solve public policy issues.

Armen Harutyunyan, RA Deputy Minister of Agriculture, talked at length about human capital and the importance of education to ensure a developed economy.

Siranush Sahakyan, Chairperson of the Commission on Ethics of High-Ranking Officials of Armenia talked about value, ethics and how to learn from past mistakes.

Sergey Sargsyan, co-founder at Armcomedy, provided the comic relief. He described his ideal Armenian public official – a competent individual with a good grasp of Armenian and English, who owns a car which price is logically correlated to their salary.

Generally speaking, this year’s speakers called for more opportunity for dialogue between policy makers and concerned citizens.

You can read full text of the blog post  by Charlotte Poulain on One Armenia website.