MEMO TO PARTICIPANTS re: CONVERSATIONS
As most of you are aware, I created TED in 1984 and chaired it through 2002. During that time I created TEDMED in 1995 and the eg Conference in 2006. For all those meetings I developed an 18-minute talk and a series of rules called the TED Commandmenis.
Several of you have asked ‘well what are the new guidelines as they relate to the WWW Conference’?
1 Participants have all been sent the schedule
listing the person with whom they have
been paired, attached again below.
2 Ifyou go to the participants page on the web
site, you can click on that person’s name and link
to his or her biographical information.
3 Ihave developed a list of 30 different premises or postulations that will begin you in improvised conversation. 4 Ihave tried this and it works.
5 You will be facing each other on comfortable
couches and not the audience.
6 There will be approximately 150 people in the audience, which will be comprised of fellow participants, guests and individuals invited by sponsors.
7 Absolutely no preparation is necessary.
8 You will not be selling a book, charity, project or religion. 9 As long as the conversation holds my attention and my perceived attention of the audience, you will be in conversation. At the conclusion, I will with reasonable politeness call up the next two individuals.
10 Ifthe conversation is fabulous but goes on so long
as to potentially cause us to miss our lunch, I will also end it and the two of you can continue it over lunch.
11 There will be no lectern but there will be a side
table for a cup of coffee or glass of water.
12 There is no strict time schedule but I will
attempt to keep the order of the final schedule.
13 On occasion I might take the liberty part way into
a given conversation to add a third person, another participant or simply another member of the audience, whom I know can add constructively to the conversation. 14 The entire meeting will be filmed as inconspicuously as possible from the far left and right of the stage
and with one small camera in the audience.
15 At this moment there are no plans to live-stream
any of the conference. There will be an app with access to a server to hold the conversations. It is planned that this will be available on 1 December and will include a running line of translation into several languages.
16 The app will also contain a large body of curated personal information about you. Further explanation about this will come to you next week.
17 Ihave personally worked out the breaks, lunches and dinners and I believe they will be of the highest quality and in
rooms that will delight you, both at Esri and at The Mission Inn.
18 Obviously there is a lot of risk about the conversations, particularly the quality, spontaneity, clarity, improvisation and surprise.
19 The goal is to find some threads that have not emerged before as you speak with your partner, which will encapsulate a type of honesty and a non- predicted path in response to each other.
20 This has happened in my several tests of this idea. 21 Torepeat, Iam endeavoring to make the filming, ambiance, location and lack of press all focus on your comfort and the quality of your experience. This above all is my concern and my goal.
22 Improvised conversation in this manner is a new form but a wonderful conversation is perhaps the oldest human media for creative discourse. So in that sense, this isa great leap backwards.
23 It will be a wonderful salon and an absolutely immersive experience with extraordinary people.
MEMO TO PARTICIPANTS re: FUTURE APP
I trust each of you has read my 24-point memo called WWW Conference Conversation Guidelines with 24 points that I believe give the spirit of the meeting itself. I’ve
had excellent response from many of you as well as
from sponsors and attendees. This memo addresses the outcome of the conference, in other words, what I do with the filming of these approximately 30 conversations.
1 It will be filmed in black and white by a team directed
by Jon Kamen and Sidney Beaumont of @radical.media,
and John Halloran of John Halloran Associates.
2 It will be unedited. There will be a camera on
each of the individuals in conversation, as well as a
long camera on the three of us sitting on stage.
3 Michael Smolens and David Orban of dotSUB will
then translate it into perhaps 10 languages and adda
running translation in English, which will address the language needs of 90% plus of the world’s population.
4 This will live on a server and be accessed by
an app that has a release date at this juncture of 1
December. The app will also contain a great deal of additional information on each of the presenters.
5 The additional curated stuff—photos, videos,
and links is what this memo is focused on.
6 Scrollmotion has already done two extraordinary
versions of the organization and design of this app. They
have offices in San Diego and New York City.
7 There will be a series of unique videos on which I will comment later, made where appropriate of you in situ.
8 The video of the entire conference of course can
be accessed by pairings of speakers from a list and
viewed as you would at the conference showing
individuals in improvised conversation. However, one
could also double click on a single name and go into
this visual biography of each of the participants.
9 The demo can be found at http://vimeo.com/user7992663/review/47187545/29ddc526fo The password is WWW. It shows an extremely brief version of C. K. Williams, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, in which you cannot only see a bio, for which we will ask a major expansion, but also photographs of the covers of a few of his 11 books. We would also like to have all of his books, which you will be able to order form the app, some outtake videos, not from the conference but from other sources that we would identify, and that you will identify, as well as, in the case of C. K. Williams, many pages, a few shown here, of his personally edited writings of his poetry—something you can’t find on YouTube, a presentation or in a book, or perhaps anywhere but this app. 10 The idea of this app is to get a behind the scenes,
behind the curtain, personalized journey through
each individual, which will also have a list of links
to suggested articles, reviews, YouTubes and other
material that will fill out this visual biography.
11 This is an important point: if you Google Richard Wurman, you come up with perhaps 450,000 citations.
The number changes daily. This would amount to 40,000+
pages, which of course nobody looks at. Basically it’s junk big data, and people mostly focus on one article and a wikipedia entry. The attempt here is to have the first primitive development of a platform for beginning to assuage some curiosity in the beginning of looking at a visual biography of at least these 50 people. If the platform works it’s scalable. That’s the idea of a new modality. If it works for people perhaps it will work for healthcare and other subjects.
12 I’m putting together a team of people consisting of Ali Smolens, who will help curate some of the materials for many of you, Paul Kandarian, a magazine writer friend
of mine from Rhode Island, and three others plus Blaise Zerega, CEO of FORA.tv who has agreed to make some original, simple videos such as Frank Gehry walking around his office showing and discussing models of buildings that he has not built, or variations of for instance the 8 Spruce Street tower in New York or hopefully Craig Venter’s laboratories in a walk-through, E.O. Wilson’s offices, etc. etc. 13 So this is a request for the following: please start thinking about the stuff that you’ve never shown: everything from baby pictures, pictures of your pets, pictures of your office, pictures of your home, things that make you real. Multiple photographs of yourself, perhaps a strip of photographs of you taken in a photo booth at an amusement park that you have in a drawer. Writings that you’ve done that show your edits, something that shows you’re real, human, and shows your process. Pictures of your laboratories. Agree to have somebody do a 5- or 10-minute walk through with you in your office or your lab or your place of work or your architectural studio. Videos or DVDs that for example I know Moshe Safdie has which he makes to describe what a building will look like in computer graphics to a client. I know he has a fantastic one of an apartment house in Singapore. And I’m sure Bjarke has similar things that he generally does not release. Covers of books about you, covers of books by you. A list of articles that you think critically describes you and links to YouTubes or other videos or other citations that you think and you have curated yourself that make you particularly interesting, not the half a million available on line. Julie Taymor most have lots of stuff as well as David Blaine.
14 We hope to have this put together, along with the
entire conference, for release by 1 December and promote
it immediately after Thanksgiving with the help of
IDG, Flipboard (Mike McCue), Esri, IIR and others. I
am going to ask for your cooperation out in Redlands at
the conference and I will have additional copies of this
and the other memo to give you when you register.
15 Attached are technical specifications for those of
you who understand them yourself. Otherwise please
show them to somebody in your office under the age of
30 who automatically understands them, who could help
us translate whatever you send us in a usable format. I
don’t understand them myself but I’m sure some of you have a better handle on this than I do. These will make
the process smooth and efficient and within budget.
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