Radical openness leads to co-creation 💡 Jay Herratti, the Executive Director of TEDx
Show Notes
Today we’re talking to Jay Herratti, the Executive Director of TEDx.
TEDx began as an experiment. Ten years ago, Chris Anderson, the CEO of TED, made a big decision. He took all the videos from the exclusive, private TED conference and put them up online for free. That decision had huge consequences for TED, and Chris recalls from that moment, TED “became obsessed with this idea of radical openness, of giving everything away for free. That led to us giving away the TED brand itself, in the form of the TEDx conferences, a couple of years later.”
People wanted to co-create with TED, not just sit back and listen in the audience. And TED gave them the chance with TEDx, volunteer hosted events of TED like talks that happen in communities around the world.
The first TEDx conference was hosted at USC in March of 2009. Today, there are more than 3,000 TEDx licensees in 170 different countries. They put on 4,000+ TEDx events each year, which are attended by 600,000 people. More than 22,000 TEDx talks have been put on stage and recorded. Each year, those talks are viewed on the TED website more than 1 billion times!
In our interview, we talk to Jay about the origin of TEDx and how the organization has evolved the support it offers TEDx organizers over the last 10 years.
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