Reflection on TEDx Vancouver

Did I learn anything? Yes. Was it a good crowd of people? Most definitely. Would you recommend it to friends? Yes. Were there ideas to spread? Absolutely.

The theme of TEDx Vancouver was “Frontier” this year.  This is my third TEDxVancouver and fifth TEDx event and it has being interesting to see it grow.

There are some who just go for the speakers, me I go to meet the audience, people who are willing to apply are already interesting and hopeful the speakers will intiate ideas for people to talk about. I prefer to learn and evolve through dialogue.

Thoughts on Speakers:

Reid Gower ****

The video was inspiring and keyed into hope, aspiration and the beauty of the planet we live on.

Nolan Watson ***

“Compassion kills”

“Don’t donate to Africa, invest in Africa!” .

“treating symptoms instead of effectively solving problems”

Spoke on how naïve compassion kills lives

Stephen Slen & Aaron Coret ***

“Pursue what gives you meaning…and what allows you to share your joy with everyone”

“Twenty years from now, the things you would be most disappointed by are the things you didn’t do, rather than the things did” – Mark Twain

A story, of force changed and how they dealt with it. Two snowboarders, one breaks his neck (and cannot snowboard anymore) both build a device to make learning snowboarding safer to learn, esp tricks.

Jai’ Aquarian & Erin Marcri **

The importance of expressing emotion.  It started off really well, that our society often represses our emotions.  But the actually case ‘the building of the a wooden temple to burn down’ (could you have built a house for a homeless family instead?) was interesting but only for people who could really afford it, so it felt self indulgent, when compared with the other stories.

Sean Aiken ***

“what matters is what makes you come alive”

“Those who are most passionate about their work, are those that are connected to the meaning behind what they do”

Jose Figueroa ***

A story of stupid immigration bureaucracy. Not the first one I have heard when you have a conservative government with a commitment to slow down immigration.

‘Canada has the obligation to respect innocent people’

I would have loved to hear this in spanish with a translated. Some people complained about the political nature of this talk, but I pointed out to them that anything involving humans and change inherently becomes politics.. hmm if politics comes from the latin – citizen + city does that mean it does not exist in the rest of the country 😉

Seth Cooper ***

Interesting speech about using games and gamers to solve some of the world tough problems, the examples were in bio chemistry.  For me this is old news.

Christopher Gaze ****

“Shakespeare is all around us. Alive and well.”

Excellent stage presence. I learned a lot of the metaphors I take for granted and are from Shakespeare. One drunk actress came up to me later to say that he had got one line wrong. Me I just respected him even more 🙂

Jer Thorp ****

“By placing data into a human context it gains meaning. These are our histories.”

A man who loves his data and knows how to use design principles to make it more readable.

Kara Pecknold ***

Saw her presentation at the Design Thinking conference, liked it.  She had definitely polished both her presentation and slides, so it was an upgrade in terms of presentation. Design process – Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver

Dr Kate Moran

“99% of life lives beneath the surface of the ocean”.

Really cool tech, sign up to see live data come in and watch the fish swim by from camera upto 800 miles out into the pacific. http://www.neptunecanada.ca/

General Romeo Dallire ****

Although the content was too much, I think he delivered some of the most important messages, where the whole audience could help.

“Inaction is an action”

“There is no way you can sustain status quo.”

“people that operate under ‘status quo’ are going to fall behind”

“The future of humanity is in the NGO Community and the youth will join them”

“That if the youth of today vote they will change politics forever”

My reflection from his:

Youth of 2day could change the political system by voting, say no to status quo or they cud let their inaction be their legacy 

Victor Lucas *****

I think in terms of content, emotion and presentation this was the best presentation, the context was = what advice will he give his girl when she is born and understands language, they are simply rules that any of us could apply to ourselves.

1. Don’t be a dick – People love people who aren’t dicks. Go light on the sarcasm. What people remember most about dicks, are that they were dicks.

2. Don’t dick around – Touch the world. It takes work, planning, and goals to be happy. Don’t let dicking around be your goal

3. Don’t hang out with dicks – If you aren’t a dick, you’ll attract people who don’t dick around. If you hang out with dicks, other people will think you’re a dick.

4. Dream

They actually feel quiet Canadian?!

The Organization:

Venue + Crowd management

Amazing for presenting, bad venue for meeting people, no WIFI within the theatre. Crowd management was poor. $80 per person and 1000 people turned up not sure where all the money went considering how many volunteers  helped out

Food

Limited, they ran out of meat and I ended with vegetarian, its ok I can eat grass ;-). Apparently no vegan? The pop tart donut things were interesting if you could fight other people for them.

Presentation organisation

The presentation organization was smooth and professional.

Music

Billy the kid was awesome.  It would have being nice to have more than one performer.

Videograph

I love sailing, but the number of times they changed the camera angle started to make we sea sick (for those speakers whom did not use slides).  Though seeing the person on the screen was helpful as if you were one or two levels up those presenters were a mite small.

After Party

This was awesome.  The venue was very cool (Space Centre) as the whole venue was open including the laser show (which was cool but too long).  Looking forward to when the venue is in a place that does not need cash for drinks.

Suggestions for next time (I will add to these as my brain returns):

Help people network

Give people 10 random people they should meet, have ‘professional’ volunteer networkers whose job is to get people together to talk, have a lot of space so people can easily discover people, have games people can play based on the talks.

Call to Action

Stalls for each speech where you could pick up notes and ways to get involved and help. As well as find people who want to talk more about that talk 🙂

Forming Community

The president dude said that he wanted to form a community and I think it can become one.  So involve us in dialogue, before and after the event. Don’t just talk at us.

1. Maybe start with the theme – crowd source it.  If you have courage get the community to vote their top five and than let the organizers choose.
2. Let us all see the applications, this will allow us to choose who we want to talk to at the event. Not brave enough for that than publish the attendees list with our links.
3. Have so many non-celebrity speakers and get some professional trainers to get their presentation skills upto speed (yes I would volunteer for that). OK after writing this I find out that you sort of did this but not with the TEDx Vancouver community but with another community (http://tedxvancouver.com/vancouverisawesome-com-helps-select-kara-pecknold-as-speaker-at-tedxvancouver-2011/)
4. Have a  space where by skilled people can volunteer (see which skills they can offer), this will help you choose good people and also people may volunteer to be coached by an expert volunteer.
5. Choose an online platform to keep the dialogue on-going after hearing the speakers (twitter is helpful for buzz not so much for dialogue).
6. In the end community forms out of lots of interactions between people and the best is when you can watch the dialogue without having to intervene.
7. Use the space on the name badges for something useful, yes your name helps, AND some unconferences have “Ask me about..” or “Three things I love…” people often just need an excuse to talk to each other, make it easier, especially for the shy types
8. I wonder what you can learn from each talk, if you applied it to TEDx Vancouver?..

TED.com talks played on the day

These were interspersed during the day. Apparently to make sure we don’t go native or become to NIMBY and share in the global movement 🙂

Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization

http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html

Charlie Todd: The shared experience of absurdity

http://www.ted.com/talks/charlie_todd_the_shared_experience_of_absurdity.html

Mark Bezos: A life lesson from a volunteer firefighter

http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_bezos_a_life_lesson_from_a_volunteer_firefighter.html

Matt Cutts: Try something new for 30 days

http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_cutts_try_something_new_for_30_days.htmlss

Whoops missed one (Thanks Chris Ryan)

What do you think?  I welcome your views both pro and anti 🙂