Hacking the Red Circle

Samuel Titera came to TEDxPrague through the route of being one of the four original Czech translators for TED talks. When he learned that TEDx was being organized in Prague for the first time, he offered help as a volunteer and soon became one of the core organizers. His first brush with TED was Barry Schwarz's talk on the Paradox of Choice. Nowadays he focuses on supporting team communication, finding and preparing speakers and organizing TEDxSalons with scientists.

Samuel now lives outside the city and our conversation centered on his focus on family and his new community. He describes himself as a why-keeper and continually is asking that question of the team.

He says he enjoys staying in touch with the 150 past speakers while helping build a stable team centered on sustainability and passing knowledge along to new team members.

This was a deep and thoughtful conversation as if we'd been friends for many years, which led to truly candid moments. I loved his quote, "Don't be afraid to take time off." This is so true (We took a 3-year hiatus ourselves).

As a musician himself, he is adamant about having music at TEDxPrague, including having a quartet in the audience one year.

You'll enjoy this show as it was one of the more personal conversations centered on how he feels about the event, instead of focusing on operational aspects of producing a TEDx.

Note, Samuel has personally translated 104 talks into Czech. Huzzah.

Samuel Titera came to TEDxPrague through the route of being one of the four original Czech translators for TED talks. When he learned that TEDx was being organized in Prague for the first time, he offered help as a volunteer and soon became one of the core organizers. His first brush with TED was Barry Schwarz's talk on the Paradox of Choice. Nowadays he focuses on supporting team communication, finding and preparing speakers and organizing TEDxSalons with scientists.

Samuel now lives outside the city and our conversation centered on his focus on family and his new community. He describes himself as a why-keeper and continually is asking that question of the team.

He says he enjoys staying in touch with the 150 past speakers while helping build a stable team centered on sustainability and passing knowledge along to new team members.

This was a deep and thoughtful conversation as if we'd been friends for many years, which led to truly candid moments. I loved his quote, "Don't be afraid to take time off." This is so true (We took a 3-year hiatus ourselves).

As a musician himself, he is adamant about having music at TEDxPrague, including having a quartet in the audience one year.

You'll enjoy this show as it was one of the more personal conversations centered on how he feels about the event, instead of focusing on operational aspects of producing a TEDx.

Note, Samuel has personally translated 104 talks into Czech. Huzzah.

Vincent Kumwenda is the Organizer of TEDxLilongwe, located in the capital city of Malawi. Because they are next to the second largest lake in the world, they focus on ideas that address local issues, such as Agriculture, Fishing, and the burgeoning startup economy. An interesting fact that you won't be able to tell from listening is that Vincent called me on his cell phone while the city was in one of their frequent blackouts, and I could only see him from the light of his phone. It was eerie and cool at the same time.

TEDxLilongwe does something interesting to reach two goals; develop a unique activation for a partner and deliver ideas to the rural regions of Malawi populated mostly by impoverished people. After his event, Vincent packed up team members and speakers and traveled to small villages over a few days and introduced the villagers to TEDx and big ideas.

Malawi is a country of 18 million people and provides a rich source of speakers and topics. Vincent's day job is the Chief Executive Officer of mHub, Malawi's first technology and innovation Hub. mHub is a social enterprise that champions the development of local technology solutions. He manages a team of determined and passionate youths who nurture young innovators and emerging entrepreneurs with technical and business skills to create sustainable business solutions.

Vincent is also a 2017 Mandela Washington Fellow, a US Government sponsored Young African Leaders Initiative.

Shout out to Randy Bretz, Organizer of TEDxLincoln for introducing us to Vincent.

When Juanita Wheeler attended TEDxSouthBankWomen in 2012, she was at a crossroads. She was a director of global marketing for a multinational corporation, but she had fallen out of love with her work. She wanted to do something bigger, something more important, and something that would change the world. Enter TEDxBrisbane. Now, in 2018, Juanita is a full-time organizer and has enlisted her entire family to help.

Let's back up. This started in 2012, then in 2013, she became a TEDx Advocate, in 2014 she was a TEDx speaker when the event was branded as TEDxSouthBank.

Since 2015 her family fills critical spots. She's the Executive in charge of Curation, her husband Rob is the head of the production, and she has three kids, 24, 20 and 19 one is the experience manager, one is the greenroom manager, and one is the backstage manager in charge of the technical production. That's a lot of TEDx. I think they only have to go into the Living Room to have team meetings.

There is so much richness in this episode, and it was kind of Juanita to say that the entire family listens to this podcast and gleans a lot of information every week. Thanks. Now that we have this conversation on record, she's added to the richness of several fundamental concepts you'll want to note.

Juanita shared a few of the episodes of the show that have been helpful, Hannu's talk about pre-mortems, Ingrid's tip to use Basecamp, Craig's insight on running a green room, Gavin's deep dive on what it takes to scribe an event and Arthur Zards treatise on Adventures. What are your favorites?

The TEDxBrisbane Advocate program is a fantastic innovation. Each attendee is assigned an advocate, 10-12 attendees per person. The advocate contacts their people and ask;

- What are you looking forward to?

- Makes sure they're settled in on the day of and have everything they need.

- Helps to introduce them to other attendees, based on their interests

- follows up with them after the event to find out which of the speaker's ideas or initiatives do they want to follow up and do something about.

Juanita is also passionate about making a difference and uses the term Engineering Impact to create an internal meme she repeats endlessly to partners, volunteers, team members and the community. They want to be sure everything they do engineers impact in some form or another.

As an organizer who works closely with family ourselves, we applaud the commitment the Wheelers have made to their community, and we'll be taking many of the ideas she's shared to heart, as should you.

Humberto Cardoso Filho is the organizer for TEDxBlumenau located near the capital of Brazil. He and his team have produced 11 main events and 7 salons, all under 100 people. He recently attended TEDfest so the population limit will be removed. The event held in March 2018 had 300, they're going to take it slow as they expand, especially into a new venue. Blumenau is a city of 400,000, with a vibrant TEDx community that has been developed strategically to keep everyone engaged by using Salons to focus on relevant themes.

"We find the conversations our city needs to have." This explains what Humberto believes makes their event compelling. Blumenau is a center for fashion in Brazil, and they've seen how fashion can be used as a tool for social transformation. They addressed several topics, including Intimacy, which sounds like it was fascinating for a Salon to focus on.

Humberto says that their coaching process takes six months and is a significant difference between TEDx and other local events. Their speakers are very prepared and the entire six months is broken down into a detailed timeline.

About his hack, he suggests that a workshop is held for sponsors to bring them into the event and show how they might help make an impact. Note: I've not heard this before, we're going to replicate.

Dora Dzvonyar is the Organizer for TEDxTum (Technical University Munich) in Germany. She's been organizing since 2015 and has several events and produced Salons including a TEDxLive event. There are 40,000 students at TUM which is bigger than some of the towns that provide a TEDx event. She's a grad student and teacher. She watches one TED talk a day and saw an announcement about a TEDx in a flyer and took the leap to be an organizer and never looked back.

One of the significant challenges for them has been establishing a structure for the event that transcends the transient nature of being a student-run organization. They now have six team leaders, that are Ph.D.'s who are going to be around, this stable core of people is able to work well with the flexibility of the primary workforce. This is an excellent solution for a University TEDx event.

An interesting anomaly that exists as a cultural consideration for the team is that in Germany, outgoing persona's are frowned upon. Everyone, especially students, wants to be perceived as serious. They encourage a playful atmosphere to counter this behavior.

When I asked her about the intrinsic awards of running a TEDx she said that if one person says, "I think differently," it's all worth it. I agree.

Dora says that she gets a lot of ideas for her event from this podcast, thanks, we love hearing that.

Januario Jano is the Organizer for TEDxLuanda, which is a beautiful city on the western coast of Angola. He is a global soul, born in Angola, with homes in London and Lisbon. Angola is a former Portuguese colony. The TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson changed everything for him and incited him to be an activist.

In 2012 he wanted to get a license for Luanda and applied, however, he wanted a more significant event than 100, so he invested in attending TED ACtive in Palm Springs. He came back home to educate his community and friends about the power of TED. Since then, he also made the trip to Doha for the TEDxSummit.

In 2005 Luanda became an economic boom town. Playing on this, Jano blends the regions deep African roots with entrepreneurial vitality to create a unique event. I love his story about having a big dinner the week before where past speakers, the current slate of speakers, local leaders, influencers and the press gather around great food to get excited about the upcoming event.

Jano does this cool thing after the event, he takes a few of the speakers, and they travel hundreds of miles into the countryside taking the talks and ideas out into the villages that would never be exposed to them.

Richard Lucas is a British businessman and social entrepreneur. He has lived in Krakow for more than half of his life, having grown up in Oxford. He has been involved with TEDx as a speaker, sponsor, and organizer, with TEDxKazimierz since 2015 and other TEDx events since 2010. Kazimierz is the Jewish district of Krakow and provides a fascinating cultural context to the TEDx event. Richard says that he curates Talks that focus on community building, offering ideas that are coming out of Kazimierz, for Kazimierz. Richard wrote extensively about community building, and I immediately shared it with our team, you may want to do the same.

Richard's life is steeped in TED. He has attended Summit, Global, various workshops and visited the TEDx in Capetown. One daughter is the licensee for a TEDx in Soctland, the other is helping at TEDxWarsawYouth, and his son is a magician who performs at TEDx events as well. Richard is deeply involved in the entrepreneurial community and promotes a modern renaissance of technology and innovation in Europe. Having met him in person at TEDFest2018, I can attest to him having an abundance of energy, required for all the things he's involved in.

Richard believes that as a licensee you're gifted, free of choice, to work with one of the top brands in the world and that TEDx is a way of making the world a better place. I was taken with his philosophy of the user experience. "They arrive at a different world than they were expecting." This episode is rich with quotes, and you'll want to have a notebook handy to capture ideas for how you can make your event more engaging, and as Richard says, "Get it right from the start!"

TEDxCampinas held their first event in March 2018. We had this conversation precisely 16 weeks before the big day. Mario Gioto, the Organizer, is also a TEDx Translator. There are over one million people in this city that is about 2 hours outside of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

He and two friends applied for the license and built a team with some of their close friends. Within four days of posting a call for volunteers on Facebook, they had over 60 people sign up.

Campinas is the Silicon Valley of Brazil and provides a wealth of sources for speakers and team members. There's an innovation hub associated with the University, and they almost instantly had 150 recommendations for speakers.

As this is their first TEDx event, it was great to hear that the way the team has worked out has been so natural and fulfilling. He mentioned that the most significant challenge is that TEDx is not a known brand in the city.

Fenella Kernebone is the Head of Curation for TEDxSydney, responsible for leading the programming for what has become one of the most significant TEDx events in the world. She also curates the youth program, TEDxYouth@Sydney and TEDxSydney Salons. Fenella manages a team of over 20 curators and producers dedicated to spreading great ideas and strong stories in fields including science, technology, arts, business, and design.

Fenella is also a noted television and radio presenter and producer, MC, interviewer and writer with a distinguished career working in arts, music, design, and culture.

She started as the host for the TEDxSydney Livestream for three years before becoming Head of Curation. She’s one of 250 volunteers at this massive event.

This episode is perfect for any organizer who’s deeply involved in curation, as she goes into all the tips and tricks, as well as how to manage the process in depth. This episode is a must listen for anyone that’s trying to figure out where to find speakers, and how to keep getting amazing speakers year over year.

I was particularly keen on learning about their FAST IDEAS concept. All attendees are encouraged to participate and get their idea on stage. There’s a separate team that works with them to get to 8-10 finalists who get a thirty-second spot on the red circle, with the audience voting by applause for who the winner is.