This morning I presented at the morning session of TED University. Lots of people asked if I could mail them the presentation. So I decided to upload it and make it available for download. A little transscript is below the slides.

Transcript: 8 ways to create a succesful TEDx

When you’re part of this community that strongly believes in “ideas worth spreading” and you give them this wonderful format of TEDx, no wonder these TEDx-organizers also want to share their ideas about what makes these local events so special. So, in the next couple of minutes I would like to present to you the 8 most important learnings that we as a TEDx-community have discovered this last year.

1. Don’t do it on your own
First of all: Don’t do it on your own. Form a team. You need people who are better than you on so many subjects. Don Levy said: “… we 
are making this as much of a 
community effort as we can.”

2. Try harder on the location
This is a picture of the European Parliament. Who would have thought that you could organize a TEDx Brussels over there? Or this one. A TEDx-event at Nasa. Space for Ideas. And it’s not that bigger is automatically better.

John Freeman has written a wonderful manifesto about slow communication. He talks about the blessings of the Internet age, but then changes the perspective and reallly makes you think differently.

He starts with a quote that might has well been taken from my book (same subject / anecdote):

“My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband,” writes the poet Don Paterson. “I meet him in the café; he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot. . . . He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listen­ing to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar.

In my book I point out that more isn’t the same as better. Just because Google has 3 billion results for your query, that doesn’t mean that you are obliged to look at all of them. Freeman poses the same question about email. Just because you can do 3 messages per minute, that doesn’t mean that you should.

It is time to launch a manifesto for a slow communication movement, a push back against the machines and the forces that encourage us to remain connected to them.

Freeman continues touching subjects of my book, stating that “The Physical World matters“. Visiting a cafe for coffee isn’t what it used to be. Instead of a pleasant place for conversation, these have turned into places where you hear the con­tinuous, insect-like patter of typing on keyboards.

Mooi fimpje over “information overload syndrome”. Het verbeeldt op Amerikaanse wijze een aantal zaken die ik in mijn boek beschrijf.