Finding ways to be creative and stay connected to your TEDx Community during these challenging times of sequestering and dealing with a global pandemic can test even the most creative Organizers. When I read about our guest, Martin Nera of TEDxUCLouvain on the TEDx Organizers Facebook page, I was intrigued about their plans that involved virtual production, strategies to engage their Community - all while focusing on creating an experience. Their theme for the event was All-Knowing Generations. TEDxUCLouvain is a University event that has been in production for five years. It was started by 4 Ph.D. students and a 100 person license. This year they were supposed to produce their live event for 800 people in April, and due to COVID, elected to postpone until the Fall and see if things changed. In fact, they didn't, they got worse, however, Martin and his team used those constraints to guide their creativity. In this episode (and sorry for the long delay between episodes) you'll hear how Martin and the team focused on living into a few guiding principles. One, Change Expectations and two, "If you don't want to disappoint, you have to surprise." You'll need to listen to the show to get the deeper and profoundly interesting way those ideas manifested themselves. Martin explains that his audience of students' lives for authentic experiences and streaming pre-recorded TEDx Talks to dorm rooms was not the experience his team wanted to deliver. Listen as he explains how they decentralized the event into forty (40) locations of ten (10) people each, created and distributed a Knowlege Box to each pod of listeners, and how they activated each pod, the collective pods and individuals to deliver a truly unique experience and refined what a TEDx event could be. Congratulations to the team at TEDxUCLouvain and the impact they made on 400 people and how they delivered on the promises they'd made to their speakers, the community and their partners.

Alerted to an amazing TEDx's theater design posted on Facebook, we sought out the organizers of TEDxHyderabad to walk us through the fantastic video and tell us the story.. Please meet Vipin and Viiveck, the co-organizers of the event and a lively pair of conversationalists who told us that story and more. Ironically Facebook came up at the beginning of the show when they told me how they hadn't known one each other, and no one on the team had known one another until a post appeared asking people to volunteer for the event. Their 2018 TEDx, with over 2,500 people, was held in the 400-year-old city of Hyderabad. Watch the video posted below to see how they transformed the space into a stunning technological wonder - and listen to the show to hear how things just barely made it by showtime. We talked about how they've interpreted the TEDx Mission of 'Ideas Worth Spreading' into their local Mission which is to "Build a community of (T)hinkers, (E)nablers, and (D)oers with the X standing for a single idea." Listen as they go into detail on how this Mission is a binding theme that pulls their team together. Team is a consistent theme for TEDxHyderabad. In their advice to existing organizers, they suggest focusing on building sustainability into the team structure. Listeners will note at the end that I was invited to join them in Hyderabad and we're going to do the next best thing which is to meet at TEDSummit 2019 in Scotland! https://HackingTheRedCircle.com

TEDxGaborone - Gomolemo Lolo Madikgetla Organizer by Mark Sylvester, Host

In 2011 Stefan Bucher, an award-winning Designer, presented at TEDxAmericanRiviera (now known as TEDxSantaBarbara.) He recently spoke with Mark Sylvester about reflections of his road to the Red Circle. Stefan speaks to audiences large and small and travels the world talking about design, typically to designers. He remarks that stepping onto the TEDx stage is unlike any other event. For Organizers, hearing this conversation will help you understand the thinking of an accomplished speaker when understanding how different the TEDx experience is - and how he'd wished he'd taken more advantage of our help. You'll get some great tips on how to coach your speakers by listening to him. Stefan's hack for speakers is to consider how you open your talk and capture the imagination and energy of the audience. He suggests using a musical opening, much like the overture to a Broadway play. You'll see how he used this in his talk from 2011. We've posted Stefan's talk below so you can watch, then listen to this episode so that you can understand the context of his answers.

On the first day of TED2019, Randy Bretz joined the show as a guest host to help me interview the founder of TEDx, Lara Stein. My favorite quote from her was "there's so much innovation on the edges." Randy Bretz wrote an extensive piece on this interview on Medium. You can read it here: https://medium.com/@randybretz/lara-stein-founder-of-tedx-and-believer-in-the-open-source-movement-7f2c949c2eb

In five minutes of listening to Mariette Fourmeaux du Sartel talk about why she has spent the past couple of years going to prison every week to help create TEDxDonovanCorrectional, you will understand how her passion drives her to continue, overcoming obstacles every visit. Mariette deeply cares for the men at Donovan Correctional and taught me so much about the challenges she and the team face in producing the event. She quoted one of the men who told her, "In my 20 years of incarceration, I've never been treated as a human until now." Wow. After the wild success of TEDxDonovanCorrectional held at San Diego’s Donovan state prison, Mariette has transferred her passion for building resilient high-performing teams and authentic human-centered leadership – honed through two decades in corporate and start-ups – into the unlikely environment that is prison. She founded Brilliance Inside, a nonprofit program to transform prison from being strictly a container of violence to a creator of rehabilitation and peace. Before this, Mariette spent 17 years in business, developing cutting-edge technologies for world-scale problems, such as a cancer-detecting medical device in Paris, d.light’s solar lanterns for the rural poor without electricity in India and a new augmented reality technology at HP, Inc. She also grew up intertwined in the creation and expansion of her family wine businesses, starting at the ripe age of 6. Mariette is a true global citizen: born in France, she’s lived on four continents and has explored some of the most remote corners of our world. Finally, Mariette holds a double materials engineering and economics degree from Brown University and a Berkeley MBA.

Monica Alba is a force of nature and the perfect person to lead the team at TEDxCancun, located in one of the most beautiful places along the Gulf of Mexico. Cancun is only 40 years old, and unlike other colonial cities in Mexico, it is full of many nationalities, creating a diverse population. Monica is also the TEDx Ambassador for Mexico, and after the first few minutes of listening to her, you'll see why New York picked her for the position. She's sees the challenge of producing a TEDx in a city of 1 million citizens as a way to open their minds and inspire them. Her latest event was themed Resonance. She said these are the ideas that need to be heard; we want to have them resonate with our community. Her advice to other Organizers was simple; be open and vulnerable and share your failures. Be able to say, "I tried this, and it didn't work out..." and learn from it.

In this special episode, recorded in September 2018 right after TEDxSantaBarbara, Mark Sylvester (me), the host of Hacking the Red Circle, is interviewed by TEDxLincoln's Randy Bretz and TEDxLaçador's Ana Goelzer. This podcast is the first time I've told my own TED story. I'm hoping it will give you a glimpse into how I think our event. Randy and Ana take a deep-dive into my motivations for producing a TEDx event here in Santa Barbara, since 2010. TEDxSantaBarbara has evolved over the years, and we've expanded into Youth, Live and in 2019, Salon events. My involvement has become more focused on the outcomes associated with a finely curated slate of speakers each year and stunning production design. We got into a great discussion about how to turn the theme influences everything starting with set design, graphic design, web design, communications strategy and most importantly the curation of the speakers. This small plate influenced the entire graphic design of the show I found in Brooklyn at TEDFest 2018. Seen on the right. For the first time, I also produced a podcast to go behind the scenes of the show, from the graphic design to selecting speakers, to talking about what it means to be a volunteer. This short-series of shows was designed specifically to bring the community closer to the core team and give them an inside look at the event. I got into a discussion about our philosophy on speaker selection, and how we brought back three of our past speakers to give the audience an update on where their idea has traveled since initially presenting it in Santa Barbara. This year we focused on the impact of ideas on our community, something I learned from several of the podcast interviews I've done with other organizers. It had a profound effect on so much of what we did. Something unique about TEDxSantaBarbara is the amount of speaker training we provide. On average, each speaker has 40+ hours of one-on-one, group and stage training from our coaching team lead by my wife and co-organizer, Kymberlee Weil. She's fine-tuned the process with her team and spends as much time as needed to be sure each speaker has everything necessary to give the talk of their lives. Randy took me on another journey into the motivation for creating this show. I spoke at length about the show has become a Master Class for me as I work on being the best organizer I can. TEDxSantaBarbara has become a laboratory for me to implement ideas I hear from these interviews. Ana wanted to know more about my journey to Red Circle and what it was like preparing for my TED talk at TEDxFargo. What a trek — shoutout to Greg Tehven, the organizer, for inviting me and creating one of the most respected TEDx events in the country. As much experience as I have with TED, it was not until I got the tap on the shoulder to walk onto the stage in front of 4,000 people that what we, as organizers, do and why we do it became instantly real to me.

TEDxLeicester, located in the United Kingdom, is organized by Siddhi Trivedi, who has a unique story; she was born in Tanzania, educated in the UK and the United States and has lived and worked across three continents. Truly a global citizen. She started as the TEDxLeicester project manager in 2015 and is most proud of the work she and her team did in 2017, hosting the very first TEDx event inside a UK prison. The aim was to build collaborative partnerships to break the cycle of re-offending. She spends a good part of the conversation detailing the challenges of producing an event inside prison walls. I loved how she phrased what it means to be an organizer, and she said that through conversations she could build partnerships, and through them, she builds opportunities. She has a unique point of view about partners and finding connections for them as a result of being involved with the event.

Gildo Conte is the Organizer of TEDxLaval, located on an island next to Montreal, in Quebec, Canada. His passion and energy are infectious, and I bet it's great fun being a part of his small, five-person team. His first brush with TED was when his kids said, "Dad, do you know about TED?" He says that it was a magical moment for him. He's purposely kept the event small, 150-250 people with nine speakers in an evening event. I love that he serves cocktails before the show. His biggest surprise was that the reach of the event in just two years has been remarkable. Gildo says that there has been a good reaction from outside the region. His biggest challenge is that the French community of Laval doesn't know about TED or TEDx. We've heard this often from other Organizers, and it doesn't appear to be isolated to any given region. As much as we think everyone's heard about TED, the reality, is they've not. In 2018 they've managed to produce four Salons, plus a Youth event. Remember, this is with a team of 5. That's impressive.

Kimberly Marcus traveled the path to the Red Circle first as a speaker then made her way to Organizer of TEDxTarrytown in 2017. She made the trek to TEDFest in Brooklyn to remove the population cap off her event. She went to Brooks Institute (originally here in Santa Barbara) to study photography and moved to the east coast in 1987, where she's a Children's book writer. If you're not familiar with Tarrytown, it's one of the river towns along the Hudson River, north of New York City. If you're familiar with the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, then you know where Tarrytown is. Tarrytown is a very diverse community in gender, race, and age. Kimberly feels that showcasing this diversity in the Talks is important. It's a small town of 15,000 people and she mentions that the 78 people who applied for 5 spots generated humbling and heartwarming conversations. When I asked what her biggest surprise was, she said, "I was surprised that it all worked." Spoken like a true first timer. We recorded this episode before she produced her second event in November 2018, and we're pretty sure it went great.