So, it is with great pride that we’d like to announce that for 2012, TEDxCanberra will be moving to the Canberra Theatre Centre’s Playhouse and will take place on 8 September 2012. Pencil it into your diaries now.

Seating just over 600, The Playhouse has been home to Bell Shakespeare, Tim Minchin, Sarah Blasko, Davis Strassman and the local Rock Eisteddfod. And now, TEDxCanberra too!

This move, which has been several months in planning and negotiation will ensure that we no longer need to disappoint the very many people who wish to come to TEDxCanberra and could not due to capacity restrictions; last year, there were 250 people that wanted tickets that simply couldn’t get them.

It should also mean that the rush for places won’t be so awful.

We have a few other special plans in store for TEDxCanberra 2012, including guaranteed student places, but we’ll be making the announcements about those things in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we can now have some more definite conversations with prospective partners and some very exciting presenters we have in mind!

We understand that volunteering can take a significant amount of time, but you’ll have fun in the process, learn lots, meet lots of interesting people and help make this event happen!

Three tiers of volunteers

We have three tiers of volunteers, with differing levels of time commitment:

• On-the-Day Helper — generally involves one or two meetings before the event, rehearsal day time and being part of the actual event.
• Volunteer - able to give occasional, specific assistance based on your skills, but unable to commit to being a part of the core team that meets on a regularly basis. If you volunteer at this level, you will be assigned to one or more teams, depending upon how much time you can commit.
• Core Member - group of volunteers who dedicate significant time to the event. This involves regular meetings (fortnightly to weekly) as well as the time required to organise and chase things up. Core Members may have responsibility for one or more teams or functions.

Expectations

Our expectations are simple — we expect our volunteers to be passionate about TED and TEDx, to communicate with their relevant Core Member(s) on a regular basis, meet deadlines and represent our TEDxCanberra brand appropriately.

Does this sound like you? If so, nominate as a TEDxCanberra volunteer!

If you aren’t able to make it to the National Library on the day – get a few friends together and be part of the day from wherever you are.

TEDxSydney — Saul Griffith — Living in the Future

I think Saul’s vision for the future is awesome and I’m sure his comic will be a hit!

TEDxSydney — Josh Cook — The Bird Whisperer

You can tell within seconds of listening to someone speak if they’re truly passionate about what they do. Josh Cook undoubtedly is, as a self-taught avian behaviourist that specialises in the art of free flight.  Josh’s practice challenges traditional notions of how birds ‘should be kept’ as pets, and provides an insight into the complex psyche of these unique creatures.

My life is seriously busy on the home front. In the last ten years, I’ve only been to the movies ten times, and three of those were part of the Toy Story trilogy. This means that watching TED talks is pure luxury for me. I wish there could be a TED talk by Aristotle, as his exploration of philosophy
and humanity would surely have been a perfect fit for TED.

The content of an event has always intrigued me. How, to quote Aristotle, ‘the whole is more than the sum of the parts’. Balancing different perspectives and personalities, creating a fantastic experience, adding the final touches and details and bringing these various parts together to engage audiences is great fun, and a great challenge. When I learnt what TEDxCanberra was hoping to achieve last year, I wanted to be involved.

From my event management perspective, TED and TEDx uses a great model, focusing on sharing ideas through compelling stories. TED events strive to bring speakers and audience together, so those lunch time conversations are a key part of the mix, and really help to make the event ‘more than the sum of its parts’.

As I mentioned, I don’t get the opportunity to watch TED videos very often. But I can recommend this talk by Ken Robinson, which I think illustrates one of my favourite quotes from Aristotle: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it”.

ThinkPlace is a Mentor partner for TEDxCanberra 2011. When they came on board, we asked them to share some of their ideas worth spreading:

The context of design is the world of the user, and its principal value is its capacity to support and enhance the various dimensions of peoples’ lives.

Design is the discipline which generates the props, systems and tools that we use to carry out our lives—the spaces we live and work in; the messages that help us learn and navigate our way through the world; and the artefacts and services that support our innumerable activities. Therefore we can make choices about how and what we design. We can be deliberate about the world we build and we can, as consumers of public services, expect policies and services that make sense and make a better society in very tangible and human terms.

An outside-in perspective on the part of government is critical to increased public well-being and to meet the social and economic challenges of the future.

People who work within government organisations develop policies, laws and services for the public. Although they have authentic intent, these people are usually not representative of the citizens they are designing for. They are looking through their own perspectives and experiences. So the policies and solutions produced may be workable, but they are not always usable, understandable or desirable. The right intent but a lack of broad perspective, or authentic understanding can lead to inside-out incremental and bureaucratic solutions, which often complicate our lives.

Design provides an approach to see the citizen’s world from new and insightful perspectives; it then translates those needs-based and problem-solving insights into a new activity system. This has been called taking an outside-in perspective or looking through a different lens.

Delivering effective citizen-centred policy and service outcomes requires the right skills, but also courage and humility on the part of government leaders.

Leaders must be prepared to admit that they are not the authority on what a community needs or wants. They need to spend time understanding issues and problems with the community rather than assuming and framing problems from a planner perspective.  This requires the courage to give more power to the community; preparedness to collaborate and co-design rather than consult; humility to listen and be prepared to change; and courage to champion a different way of developing services.

ThinkPlace is an up and coming public sector design firm in the Asia Pacific region, founded by Canberran Principal John Body in 2005. Starting with an idea of “vision to reality”, it has since grown to a strong multidisciplinary team of 15 people with experience in service design, user research, organisational change, design methods (co-design), collaboration, strategy and facilitation.

We’ve now decided on a final price and process for TEDxCanberra 2011 registration.

Registration for TEDxCanberra will cost $85 per person (inclusive of processing fee) which will include the day of talks, morning and afternoon tea, lunch, drinks afterwards and a small bag of gifts from our partners.

This post is a reminder to potential attendees of exactly how the ticketing process will work. It’s important that you understand this before tickets go on sale on 12 August.

1. Registration for TEDxCanberra is open to everyone. This means anyone who purchases a ticket before they are sold out can attend. You don’t need to apply or to be selected to be able to come along.
2. If you are on our newsletter list, early-release tickets for subscribers will go on sale at 9:00AM AEST on Wednesday 10 August — 48 hours ahead of public sales. However, as we have in excess of 300 people on our list, we will be randomly selecting 150 of those people and offering them a guaranteed place. You need to be on the list by 5:00PM AEST 5 August 2011 to be included in the ballot.
3. Those selected in the ballot will be sent an email on Monday 8 August and will have 24 hours to purchase their ticket. Please check your spam filtering settings to allow emails from ‘eventbrite.com’ (last year some attendees reported that emails from Eventbrite ended up in their spam folder). If tickets are not purchased within this period, they will be returned to the pool and will be made available to newsletter subscribers as part of our early-release (see 2 above).
4. There is a maximum of one ticket per registration. Tickets are not shareable. We understand that you may want to purchase extra tickets so that you can attend TEDxCanberra with a friend, family member or colleague, but given the high demand for tickets we think the fairest way to manage the demand is to limit tickets to one per registration. If you know someone who you think might like to attend, please encourage them to sign up to the newsletter to get access to the early-release ticket sales.
5. Tickets may be transferred provided you inform us in accordance to the registration policy.
6. No refunds for tickets will be given after 16 September 2011.

The full TEDxCanberra registration policy is available for you to read.

If you’d like to guarantee yourself a place at TEDxCanberra, the only way to do that is to make sure your organisation is one of our partners.

I signed up for TEDxCanberra 2010 because it was an opportunity to go to a TED conference, but also to hear some of the speakers I’d already heard a lot about. I’m a journalism/new media geek, so Julie Possetti and Mark Pesce were at the top of my list.

Ash Donaldson talking about perceptions and biases at TEDxCanberra 2010

What I wasn’t expecting was the effect that some of the other speakers would have for me. In particular, Dawn O’Neill’s talk on suicide prevention and Pat McGorry’s talk on a better way for mental health reform did a lot to make me think more about mental health (mine and others’), to the point that within six months of the talks, I’d completed a mental health first aid course, as they encouraged.

Other talks had a lasting effect, too. Ash Donaldson’s discussion of cognitive dissonance comes back to me at least once a month, as a welcome reminder that biases are a natural part of being human. Francis Owusu and the Kulture Break crew have helped me to reconsider what my expectations of traditional masculinity, and my cousin and I were keen followers of Kristin Alford’s ‘I am a Scientist (get me out of here!)’ project earlier this month.

Finally, I had such a good time that I joined the team to work on this year’s TEDxCanberra, helping out with communications. It’s been great to get a look at how a TEDx event comes together, and I expect I’ll be involved with TED for years to come.

The TEDx community of organisers is very strong, catching up often and wherever we can. Just a few weeks ago, Steve managed to catch up with several TEDx organisers at TEDxSydney, including David Ward from TEDxDubbo and Rajasekar Nonburaj from TEDxChennai as well as TEDxAdelaide licensee and TEDxCanberra presenter, Kristin Alford, presenter Ash Donaldson and TEDActive host, Rives who had obviously fallen into a set of clippers by accident and now shares a matching haircut with Steve! Next, in more TEDx news, more than 7000 TEDx videos from events around the world are now available directly from the TED site. They’re progressively tagged with the same set of keywords the main TED Talks site uses. It’s an amazing resource! You can search by tags, speaker, language and a number of other facets and by individual events, including, naturally, ours. Last, in a fantastic effort, PostRank have pulled data about the growing library of TED Talks and parsed it through some clever code to determine which talk ranks as the most engaging. They’ve taken all the talks and clustered them by subject and by social network they’ve been discussed on to break their analysis down. It’s an amazing piece of work, and all in just 40 lines of Ruby.

We’ve held a number of meetings together, brainstormed, had calls, talked to potential presenters and partners, made videos, taken photos, written thousands of words on what it takes to be a part of something like TEDxCanberra, and a couple of us even went to TEDActive in Palm Springs and to our sister event run by our friends at TEDxSydney. And, above, you can see the promo that Gavin, one of our core creative team, put together.

It’s all starting to fall into place.

This year, we’re planning to be a little bit bigger and a little bit more professional. We’ve got an enthusiastic volunteer crew with new and old faces and a bunch of skills we didn’t have in 2010.

We’ve already attracted a number of exciting partners to work with us on making TEDxCanberra 2011 something special, while retaining that open access, intimate feel we had last year. We’ll be making our partner announcement in early July.

Over two-thirds of our presenter places are already filled, but we’re still looking for more; particularly musicians and women as six of the eight women we’ve already invited aren’t available on 24 September. They have busy lives! Our presenter lineup will be announced in early August.

We’re expecting significant demand for places at TEDxCanberra 2011, so we’ve devised a system that we believe will make it as equitable as possible, should demand exceed availability.

If you’d like to keep up with what we’re doing, you can follow us on a number of social networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plancast and Lanyrd as well as subscribe to our newsletter (which will bring you a number of extra benefits).

We’re looking forward to bringing you TEDxCanberra 2011. Come join us!