Dear Mike Lundgren and all the volunteers who worked so hard to put on the TEDx conference this past week in Kansas City:

You worked really hard. You surely put in hundreds of hours preparing, curating, planning, and jockeying to get everything just right for the TEDxKC conference…and I really appreciate that. It isn’t something that people can easily overlook! We know how hard it is to put something together along the lines of TEDx. I’ve put on events before, and I know how hard they can be to organize and implement. TEDx has a reputation for being first-class in every way, and I’m sure you never intended for it to be anything less!

But…I’d like to suggest one major change before you ever try to do this again: find a new place to host it! (and, if not, find a new production company — more on this later).

At the risk of sounding like a complainer, I need to say that I love the Nelson-Atkins Museum. It’s a grand place…part of Kansas City’s history and an absolutely gorgeous facility…for some types of events. But not this one.

 

Let’s look back at how this all played out, shall we?

  • Tickets went on sale July 11 and sold out within 90 minutes. That should tell you the first thing here: people love TEDx and there’s a demand for it. Obviously, a great demand. Not just a few dozen people, a few hundred — more than 1,000 people — wanted to go, and some got tickets and some didn’t. I was not fortunate enough to secure a ticket within those first 90 minutes, and was bummed to be put on a waiting list that never produced a phone call from the Nelson — they just forgot about me. That process in itself sucked. 90 minutes? Does that really give “normal” people a chance to do this?
  • Fortunately, my friend Matthew didn’t forget about me, and had an extra ticket, so I was again excited to go.
  • I got to the Nelson in plenty of time for a “real” seat, only to find that VML had locked up a whole bunch of seats for themselves and yet couldn’t be troubled to actually sit in them. So there we were, wandering around in the auditorium, looking at all the empty “VML seats” but couldn’t find any for ourselves. Nobody at the doors could have been troubled to say, “sorry, this is full.” We had to find that news out for ourselves, gritching about VML’s apparent greediness in reserving rows and rows of seats but not sitting in them. The “public” wasn’t allowed to save seats, according to some in the room. Reluctantly, we proceeded to the “overflow” area.
  • Dejectedly sauntering to the overflow room, we were subjected to a dark, acoustically-wretched, uncomfortable-seat disaster. Although the musical guests did (lovingly) come and visit us at the “kid’s table” for some brief musical entertainment (thank you, Barnaby Bright!), it was about the only sign that anyone even knew we were there…stuck in that dark, echoey room, all alone…
  • Once the event started, we were subjected to some “stage” video of lower-thirds and overlays designed to be shown over the top of the actual speakers’ video, but it took Harvest Productions several minutes to realize that we weren’t getting the actual “speaker video” up on the screens. We were seeing everything BUT the speakers, along with a bunch of really cool corner-wipe effects brought on by someone who was seemingly determined to try every video transition they could find on the switcher (look! an orthogonal-gradient-spinning wipe!).
  • All during your introduction and welcome, Mike, we got to hear some sort of white-noise-nothing-on-the-FM-dial interference while still not seeing you on the video until you were about ready to introduce Jenn Lim. It sounded as though a wireless mic receiver was picking up the absence of a signal and didn’t have any squelch, so we had that wonderful mix of noise and audio for the first several minutes, well into Jenn’s speech.
  • Then, in our minds, we could hear someone saying, “hey, let’s just start playing around with the EQ until we filter out this noisy stuff.” As they twiddled around, we could gradually hear frequencies dropping out of the sound, until just a fraction of Jenn’s voice remained. No high end, no midrange, just (x-y) where x was her voice and y was all the random white-noise-interference spectrum.
  • Once we finally got to that point, and had video, it was out of sync by quite a bit. Probably the difference between the speed of the audio signal and an HD video signal having to travel over distance (yeah, I know that can be an issue). Like a bad kung-fu movie, we got to (sort of) hear Jenn’s speech on happiness, while wondering exactly what she said that made the audience chuckle so much — because we couldn’t hear the nuances of her speech and thus missed her humorous moments. Various Twitter references included Charlie Brown’s teacher, and tin-cans-and-string.
  • Someone must have said, “hey, let’s start playing with some time-delay here…so we can make the audio arrive a little later to match the video.” After some really cool Star Wars flanging effects swooping up and down, we then had SynchronizedJenn™ but really, badly, horribly distorted audio.
  • This was not merely clipped audio at the loud points. It was, as @KCURCST described it as sounding like, “it’s being played at full volume out of ipod buds.”

As I looked around the room, I saw people tweeting on their phones. Grimacing. Talking to each other. Getting up and leaving. Looking in the back of the room to see if there was any sound technician anywhere near us (it didn’t appear there was). So here we are…stuck in a faraway room, with only a couple of video screens and some small, randomly-placed speakers and we’re supposed to sit quietly in our chairs and watch/listen while the “real” event is going on elsewhere in the building.

This is where I have to rant a little: since Harvest Productions is a sponsor of TEDx (and they’re listed everywhere as such — t-shirts, event badges, etc.), couldn’t it be reasonable to think that they would commit every possible resource to putting on a dynamite, world-class quality show for the unfortunate overflow folks? Even if they were just placebos, couldn’t they afford to have some techs stand around in the room, looking like they were paying attention and helping to deliver the show? Instead, I saw virtually no scrambling in the room at all (other than the people scrambling to leave because their ears were bleeding and it became apparent that it wasn’t getting any better). Maybe the scrambling happened elsewhere and we didn’t see it, but the impression was that we were stuck here, in this dark room, unable to enjoy anything because it so…incredibly…awful — and there was nobody to turn to for help. I’m sure the smiling volunteers at the doorway were probably inundated with frustrated patrons leaving in droves, especially considering that we could have avoided all this headache by simply staying home and watching the live stream (although I have to wonder if it turned out any better?).

Here’s the thing: TEDx is all about speakers and their talks. Having an effective audio-visual production is not secondary to a TEDx event. It cannot take a back seat; it can’t be seen as a “nice feature” or “icing on the cake” or “extra added flair.” If the production is the production, then the production should be flawless. It should be tested and re-tested and perfected before anyone has to arrive at the “kids table” for an admittedly already-second-rate experience. There should be extra batteries for all the mics, extra cable runs for all the cables, extra camera people in case one faints, extra boards and extra projectors and extra speakers and extra sets of HUMAN eyes and ears and extra everything, to handle whatever comes, without exception. There is no room to fail! If a failure starts to occur, it can and should be fixed immediately, and the point of failure identified early in the process for those who have to endure the problem. After the second recorded speaker (Kathryn Schulz, appropriately enough, on “being wrong”), we left. We had already decided that we couldn’t take another 90 minutes of tin-cans-and-string-would-sound-better audio. We weren’t alone. Walking out of the room, I heard someone get up to announce that “the problems were being fixed” and folks could either (a) endure the disaster or (b) hit the bar upstairs, where they could conceivably drink themselves into hearing things just fine. Wow! There’s some options, huh!?

I proposed then — and continue to propose now — that there should not NEED to be an overflow room.

The production company you choose to hire (and I hope it’s someone else next time, since Harvest has proven their ineptness) should only NEED to take care of one big production in one big room. Period. Having to really create two separate experiences for two different audiences from one “point of sale” is just too much to try and pull off with limited resources.

I’d love to see TEDxKC be held somewhere else next time…in a BIG venue. Something that could easily handle 1,000+ without overflow. Sell tickets with no “overflow” option. Sell seats, not wishes for seats. Let people arrive on time and find their assigned, reserved seat instead of having to ditch work early and show up at 4:30 just so they can get an actual chair. Reserve all the chairs you want for VML, because we’ll never have to worry about it. Make the tickets go on sale at a reasonable time, with plenty of advance warning for attendees, and they’ll be very happy.

In fact, I wouldn’t even mind if you had to charge two or three times the price; I’d gladly pay $20 or $30 if I knew only two things: (a) I’d have a place to sit, and (b) I could see and hear the people I came to see and hear.

By curating some of the most phenomenal, talented speakers out there, you’ve taken a giant step. TEDxKC isn’t going to get smaller, it’s only going to grow. As word spreads about how wonderful the experience was, you’ll pick up many more guests.

I’d just like to see you take the one step that needs to happen the quickest: find a decent place for this to unfold and the rest will work itself out. I’ve suggested the Crossroads Arts District, any of the large performance halls at the community colleges in town (like Yardley Hall at JCCC which seats 1,350), or even the forthcoming Kauffman Performing Arts Center. Bartle Hall could work in a pinch. Sprint Center holds lots of people! Kemper Arena could use some action nowadays. Pick something where people can see and hear and experience TEDxKC the way it was intended, and we’ll be forever grateful.

I know there is probably a lot of finger-pointing and apologizing and garments being torn right now, and I don’t want to make it worse. I just want to open up a dialogue that could conceivably lead to a much better TEDxKC experience for everyone involved.

Thanks for all you did, and if you need a volunteer to help next time, I’m game.