TEDFestNYC 2018 Pre-Event

The problem with many conferences and events is that the best ones fill all the time with activities… Ironically, many people attend because they hope to make business or social connections within their community, but there often isn’t time for that. Solution? The Pre-Event!

The 2018 TEDFestNYC event brought together 500 TEDx producers from around the world, for four days in Brooklyn. The community was very eager to make international friends, discuss best-practices, and share good times. The official conference organizer need to cram activities into every minute of every day, in order to offer a strong value for attendees. But knowing that a subset of attendees might desire something more — especially the folks who traveled from very far — we obtained permission from the event to run an “unofficial pre-event”. The idea came from Richard Lucas, then I was “First Follower“, and eventually we had over a dozen co-organizers volunteering their time to make this wonderful thing happen.

Managed very democratically, we aimed to have no ‘leadership’. Every time we heard an idea of ‘it would be better if someone did _________’, we invited the person with the idea to take the initiative and go do that thing. The event itself had no official agenda either; the first day began with a big meeting to discuss how we all think the time should be spent. This is also known as “Open Space Technology“. Coincidentally, our event was made possible by the generous donation of a venue, from the rising star of co-working, Spaces.