Hacking the Red Circle

Syed Irteza Ubaid is the Organizer of TEDxLahore, the TEDx Ambassador for Pakistan and a TEDx Translator. That's a lot of TED. He has been involved with at least 18 TEDx events and has one of those personalities that we see so often when we talk to Organizers, passionate, curious, interested and helpful.

TEDxLahore is the oldest TEDx in the city of 15 million people. If you search for Lahore on the TEDx event page, you'll see there have been over 90 events in the city. Lahore is a major cultural and educational hub, and the citizens are hungry for intellectual events that challenge and stimulate them.

In 2017 he was nominated by his peers to be a TEDx Ambassador and the liaison for the region with TED in NYC. The role of ambassador includes helping TEDx leadership understand the cultural considerations of the region. There are 20 TEDx Ambassadors.

He deeply involved in TED and TEDx and has helped form 20 TED-Ed clubs throughout the city as a way of nurturing community.

He shared a great trick, which is to have journalists on your curation team. They have ways of finding the most interesting people and stories, especially in a city of 15 million people.

Réka Artner and her team of 70 have been producing TEDxVienna for several years now. She joined the team after attending TEDxVieannaLive in 2012. It's one of the TEDx events that other organizers would love to visit. Set in some of the cities most amazing historical venues, this TEDx also features Adventures (see video) and workshops. TEDxVienna has been around since 2010 and has produced 23 events, including Salons and Live simulcasts.

Réka has an infectious laugh, and her first job was as an event manager and working with 50 volunteers on the day of the event. She says that the most significant surprise has been what the audience reacts to. Having a close liaison with the speakers gives her a sense of how the audience will respond, and they resonate with the ideas in unexpected ways. She loves this.

The idea of producing Adventures for the event, essentially mini-field trips, led by volunteers, is a way to take attendees on a local exploration into a place that they'd probably not be able to get to on their own. They did ten adventures with 20 people in each one. (The more we hear about adventures, the more we want to produce them ourselves).

Javier Yunes, whom I met at TEDFest last year, is the organizer for TEDxRosario in Argentina. His town has over 1 million citizens, and thousands of them come to their event each year. He’s most excited about a recent Organizers’ workshop he attended in Bariloche and told us the story of his first workshop in 2010 on a floating hotel in Amazonia.

Javier tells a great story about a big surprise at his most recent event. TEDXRosario 2017 was held outside, and a sudden rainstorm forced the event to halt. He and his team were resourceful and located a source of umbrellas, but not enough, so people had to share. Sharing umbrellas turned into an unexpected community building activity. He says the best part of the event was the rain. Note: Maybe they didn’t think that at the time.

Javier has been producing TEDx events since 2009; he was one of the first. And in talking to him, you can tell that there’s a lovely, friendly rivalry between him and other South American countries, especially Brazil. He says, “We’re catching up.”

Kiki Tolles is the Student Executive Producer for TEDxLagunaBlancaYouth, an event held here in Santa Barbara, California, home of the Hacking the Red Circle podcast. Kiki is a member of a TEDx production class this semester, led by Anna Alldredge, their faculty advisor.

Kiki has the type of passion and energy that we've come to expect from other organizers and more pronounced in Youth event teams. She was first introduced to TED Talks by her teachers, and when the opportunity to produce an event, and be a part of the leadership came up, she jumped at it.

With over 30 students on the team, they've been able to organize, develop and produce an event that's going to happen two weeks from the date of this post (January 31st, 2018). It's not unusual for a group of teenagers to create a TEDx these days; we see it all the time. However, for this team, they have had to work through some staggering logistical challenges since the most massive fire in the state of California started on December 4th, 2017 and burned until a few days before Christmas. Then on January 8th, 2018, the day they would have returned to school, the community was hit by devasting floods and mudslides. This event has separated students and teachers from the school and has made logistics very challenging. As of the posting of this show, the main highway connecting Santa Barbara to the world is closed for the foreseeable future.

I love talking to first-time organizers before they've done the event, then circle back and have a cup of coffee afterward, to see how perceptions and assumptions changed in the meantime. Kiki said one of the primary motivations for her and the team is to put on something real, produce an actual event and leave a legacy for the school.

As the executive producer of TEDxSantaBarbara, I invited Kiki and their executive team to the dress rehearsal for our event on November 11th. We escorted them backstage, into the production room, visited the green room, and they sat through a couple of the speaker's talks, hearing the coaches give last minute advice. It was eye-opening for them and gave them a good sense of the many moving parts it takes to produce an event.

Emmanuel Adegboye is the organizer of TEDxYaba, which is a community located in Lagos, Nigeria. He has a long relationship with TEDx, going back to 2014 as co-organizer of TEDxIfe. He is also the TEDx Ambassador for West Africa, and once you get to know him, you'll understand why he was singled out to represent this vital part of the world for TEDx. He's been on the team of five TEDx events in Lagos and in 2017 took the lead as the sole organizer and leader.

Yaba, located in the center of Nigeria's Silicon Valley is a tech cluster and hub for entrepreneurial activity and thought leadership. Emmanuel says that they balance the tech-heavy influence with storytellers and artists to make their event reflective of the region.

Our listeners know that I'm always interested in local cuisines and how the food choices reflect regional favorites. Emmanuel spoke highly of Jollof Rice, which looks delicious.

I appreciated his take on why he does TEDx, and it's a perfectly ambassadorial reply, "I don't make TEDx about me - it's about building a community.

Kaila Colbin is the Curator of TEDxChristchurch (New Zealand) and TEDxScottBase. She's also the founder of Missing Link and the New Zealand Ambassador for Singularity University, a co-founder and Chair of the non-profit Ministry of Awesome, and a force of nature. I learned a lot about Christchurch during our conversation and how she came to NZ in the first place.

In 2009 she did a talk at TEDxAuckland and was hooked. She'd set a goal to speak at TEDx and achieved it. She also set a goal to produce a TEDx in Antarctica and rallying other Kiwi TEDx Organizers to the cause. We interviewed Trent Yeo about his role in that enormous effort. I loved her quote about that effort, "We married the hurdles of working in Antarctica plus producing a TEDx."

You'll want to listen as she tells the story of the 2011 earthquake that destroyed 70% of the city, just weeks before TEDx. I won't spoil the surprise. How they managed the crisis turned into a talk that she gave at TEDActive in 2011.

Mark Sylvester and Kymberlee Weil have been bringing TEDx to Santa Barbara since 2010. They started with TEDxAmericanRiviera on 10/10/10, produced it again in 2011 then again in 2012. After a couple of years off, they produced two TEDxLive events, rebranded the local event as TEDxSantaBarbara and relaunched in 2016.

Mark and Kymberlee have a great story about how they met and created a project that debuted at TED2003, which led to a software company that is still Mark's day job, in addition to podcasting. Kymberlee fell in love with helping people get their ideas out and onto the red circle and since 2010 has coached over 150 speakers, both for TEDxSantaBarbara and many TEDx events around the world.

Kymberlee has been behind the microphone as well, speaking at the TEDSummit on Story Telling and in other venues around the globe. It was at the 2016 TEDSummit where Mark and Kymberlee learned that they're one of the few couples who work together to produce a TEDx event. (They'd love to meet more TEDx organizing couples at TEDfest in 2018!)

One of the great things about hosting this podcast and producing an event is that we're able to share the best practices and fresh ideas we hear from others with our team, in real-time. As a result, we've added new experiences, team members and workflows to improve our event.

Stacy Bradford is one of three co-founders of TEDxTysons. Their event is just 20 minutes from Washington DC and is in the middle of a tech corridor she calls the Tech Petting Zoo.

Their most recent event in June 2017 called [i]mpact featured speakers who represented organizations who each are making an impact on the community and the world.

She first encountered TED Talks at a sales training course, listening to Simon Sinek's, How great leaders inspire action. As the Executive Producer, she's always looking for a way to have a hyper-local focus and continue their emphasis on being deeply integrated into the community.

Norberto Amaral is the organizer of TEDxPorto, located in Portugal and formally known as Oporto. It's a long story. Norberto tells us about how they were not able to get into the venue until midnight the night before the event started, on March 31, 2017. The production crew worked all night and the opened for 1,100 people the next morning on April 1st. No fooling.

They do something that we've not heard in all the shows before, which is to have a stand-up comedian do a seven-minute wrap up at the end of each session. This reminds me of Tom Reilly's end-of-TED comedic routines back in the early days of TED. Sounds like a lot of fun.

Norberto is one of the organizers that loves being the host of the event. He says, "I put people on their toes and keep them uncomfortable - to make them rethink." He says he wants to lift the veil on the talk, and spark curiosity. He'll frequently stay on stage to ask one question to get more information from the speaker. Something this really buts a nice bookend on the talk.

Bethany Lerch is a former Fulbright and Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar and was a speaker on the 2016 TEDxOshkosh stage. She spoke about avoiding the pitfalls of taking the wrong approach to international aid using examples from her time in Afghanistan.

She served as a military advisor in Kabul, Afghanistan, from February 2015 until June 2016 and while there received a note from TEDxOshkosh inviting her to tell her story. She made a list of the four things she could speak on, and the curators selected one from her diverse set of life experiences.

Bethany tells us a fantastic story of how she wrote her talk, by walking, for a month, across Spain. She trekked the Spanish Camino and memorized her talk one-step-at-a-time. She finished just in time to arrive on the TED stage. (Note: We don’t recommend cutting it this close for other speakers.)

She’s the founder of able to, a non-profit also known as the Afghan Education Project, which brings women from Afghanistan to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to develop their leadership skills, then returns them to their home country. Able to is a project she runs in conjunction with local and regional Rotary groups and individual members.