Our founder and leader, Vlad Fiscutean, is the first romanian to ever speak on a TED stage. He talks about his experience at TEDGlobal 2011 in the following article published by the TEDx Official Blog.
Photo: Jon Ross / TED
Vlad Fiscutean is the Organizer of TEDxTimisoara, a TEDx event in Romania, this is his experience from Sunday, July 10t at TEDGlobal:
Your first TED Conference experience is indeed unique. You probably hear this every time, and in fact it is true! Even if looking at TED.com videos from the comfort of your home is a great and rewarding experience by itself, being two meters away from such a big number of great achievers is fantastic!
It sometimes feels like the whole universe is arranging the stars for you. I’ve met by chance people whose work I’ve follow for several years, and to whom I was really happy to be able to congratulate. Combining this with the interdisciplinary approach of TED’s curating, leaves you with a bird eye-view perspective on the state of the world today, and of our future.
The closest you can get to experimenting with this is through local TEDx events in your city or country — TED and TEDx are in many ways similar and different. One is global, and the other is local. One is focused on the world, another one on your community. But with globalisation and democratization of information, you can now find everywhere in the world people concerned and working on similar ideas.
For us TEDx Organizers at TEDGlobal, everything started earlier. On July 10th, we checked in to the Royal Lyceum Theatre early in the morning and attended the TEDx Workshop, which, for the first time, was transmited live to a few hundred other TEDx Organizers around the world.
Since I was a speaker at the TEDx Workshop, I attended the speaker briefing. TEDx Workshop host Rives and others gave us valuable information on speaking on the TED stage. TED is accessible-made knowledge, it uses entertainment to widely spread ideas and it makes bridges between thinkers and doers, so that things get made. That’s a powerful combination!
We heard some great talks from TEDx Organizers, and the announcement of the TEDxWWW excited everybody in the room — we are already looking forward to that!
This year it was the first time that the TED team organized an unconference session for the TEDx Workshop — we set up 6 groups with different themes related to organizing TEDx events and everybody discussed for a few hours. This helped us to get a better understanding of the necessities, questions and good practices that TEDx Organizers have around the world — we realized that the situation is almost the same everywhere.
Later in the day, we went to a hike to Arthur’s Seat and afterwords to a nice picnic. All these proved to be a great opportunity to meet some of the most dedicated TEDx Organizers and learn from their experience organizing their events, as well as to truly enjoy Edinburgh.
