Among the many hats worn by guest blogger Dave Troy, he is the lead of over 100 volunteer organizers of the upcoming TEDxMidAtlantic conference. Check out what they've got going on.
TEDxMidAtlantic, the locally-organized offshoot of the TED conference, is starting to attract serious attention as its lineup of speakers continues to grow. Now just one month out (November 5 at Maryland Institute College of Art), the event will undoubtedly generate some serious buzz for Baltimore and the region.
Speakers include economist and New York Times columnist Tyler Cowen, National Public Radio host and journalist Scott Simon, Actress from The Wire and founder of Rewired for Change Sonja Sohn, American Visionary Art Museum Founder Rebecca Hoffberger, and most recently added, United States Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra. You can see the rest of the speaker lineup by visiting the TEDxMidAtlantic Web site.
The event is focused on the increasing convergence of technology, entertainment, and design, and features speakers from multiple disciplines who are challenged to give "the talk of their life" in a compact 18-minute format ideal for distribution via the Internet. Select videos from TEDxMidAtlantic will be made available through the hugely popular TED.com website, where viewership for individual videos can reach into the millions. The driving force behind TED is "Ideas Worth Spreading," and the conviction that sharing ideas can actually change the world.The theme of TEDxMidAtlantic is "The Power of Stories," and will try to uncover the stories hidden beneath all kinds of endeavors.
Perhaps most notably, the event is being organized by a team of over 100 ad-hoc volunteers who are all contributing their time to five organizing committees. This is possible through the use of online tools like Groupsite (whose CEO Clarence Wooton was interviewed here last week), Google Groups, Google Docs, Wordpress (website), and Wufoo (forms). Without these tools, organizing an event like this would be impossible without a top-down, command-and-control style of organization, and that's not realistic when you're working exclusively with volunteers.
Instead, we're looking to capture the energy of many people when they are able to contribute it, and that gives us a lot of redundancy – when one volunteer gets busy with other responsibilities, a given task may shift over to another. And with everything available online, this is a fairly seamless transition.
If you would like to attend TEDxMidAtlantic, please be sure to visit the Web site and apply now. The event is free but space is limited, so we ask that you fill out a short application form. We hope to see you on November 5th!
