Look Who's Meeting in Tahrir Square: Conference Room Names Reach for Freedom

At Tilt, a San Francisco-based app for helping people pool money, every mundane workday meeting is organized around nothing less grand than humanity's dream for freedom. Want to get together with colleagues to discuss app upgrades, mobile marketing strategies, or the office's new hot desking arrangement? You first need to pick a meeting space named after Tiananmen Square, Tahrir Square, or another location "where collective action changed history," as Tilt Chief Executive James Beshara explains.

"Going with ABCD naming conventions, it would be very unlike us," Beshara says. "It makes a lot of sense for us to put some really significant meaning behind them." One of the early employees had an idea to name meeting rooms after locations of revolutions, and the CEO broadened the criteria to include any place where collective action happened. Among the 12 conference rooms is a space named Bastille and another dedicated to Liberty Island, where tourists collectively gaze upon a statue. It's unclear if meetings held in Robben Island, a room named after the infamous prison where Nelson Mandela spent 18 years, feel as if they drag on.