Development of TEDx community in Slovenia

TEDx community in Slovenia is one of the most active TEDx communities around the world, if we take a look at number of events organized per capita. First TEDx event in Slovenia happened on 25th of May 2009 in Ljubljana, soon after TEDx concept was born and offered as an option from TED.

Next big move was TEDxLjubljana event in Kino Šiška for 400 attendees, which was also my first TEDx event ever. We were growing, and going to bigger and bigger venues. First really big event we did was in Opera for 550 people.

But that was still to small, so we moved to the biggest event hall in Ljubljana - Cankarjev dom for 1500 people. Tickets demand stays the same - every time they are gone in less then 1 minute. We usually open the free tickets on Eventbrite platform and almost 1500 people are waiting to press "get the ticket" button quick enough. Pretty awesome and it's similar with other TEDx events in Slovenia.

Since 2009, TEDxLjubljana organized 22 events with 131 speakers and 7486 attendees. That also boosted birth of other TEDx communities around Slovenia. If you visit http://www.ted.com/tedx/events and search Slovenia and click past events, you will find an amazing list of events - 61 events happened in Slovenia so far. From livestreams, standard events, University events, salon events, youth events, women events. I managed to attend 41/61 events in Slovenia. Yes, I’m a bit weird, I keep the list. :)

Some extraordinary things have happened on TEDxLjubljana stage so far that I’ll never forget and I wish to share some of those moments with you.

 

I'll never forget Juan and his dedication to make his speech perfect. We had to spent him measures of our red carpet, so he could practice at home. He rehearsed like 60 times. Watch his speech (in english) here.

We organized an event just under the highest slovenian mountain. Speakers had to walk around 6 hours and afterwards, they gave a talk at Kredarica in a mountain hut, 1 hour walk below Triglav. Next morning, we conquered Triglav together and we even took a TEDxLjubljana sign with us. Since the hut was really small, most of the event organizers decided to step out of the room to give space to others. 

 

Kredarica hut for event underneath Triglav, where speakers were standing 0,5 meter away from the audience due to lack of space. We first wanted to do the event outside, but it was too tricky due to the wind. Watch my favourite talk from Triglav event here (in slovenian).

Our team member Dan even took TEDxLjubljana sign on the top of the Triglav.

1500 people thumbwrestling in Cankarjev dom

We even had a stage proposal in front of 1500 people

In September 2015, we organized first TEDx event on a plane, ever and 4 brave speakers managed to handle their public speaking stress and flight combined. I truly admired them and it was also funny, that we were flying from Ljubljana to Maribor and since a flight would be too short to handle 4 speakers, we went to Split, Croatia, turned around and went back to Maribor.

The video of first TEDx event on a plane

 

 Crazy physicists / chemists experiments on my first event as an active volounteer

Twitter momentum after TEDxChange. Whole team was sitting at the bar, reading Twitter posts, that were mostly saying "best event ever" etc. We were so motivated and proud of our speakers and of the event. :)

 
 

TEDx community in Slovenia isn't special only due to the high volume of events. While attending some international TEDx gatherings, I noticed some things about TEDx community, that are specific to TEDx community in Slovenia.

1. Everyone knows each other and different organizing teams developed from friends and family. Someone did events in Ljubljana, her brother started with events in another city and a friend brought TEDx to his own community. We’re very connected, since we only have 2 million people in the whole country.
   
   
2. We all give a lot of emphasis on speakers preparations. I can say, that credit goes to TEDxLjubljana, where speakers preparations are biggest part of the event preparations (giving feedback, working on a story, filming the speaker etc.). We managed to bring our good practices to other TEDx communities in Slovenia (mostly by meeting with them as soon as their event appeared on TEDx website).
   
   
3. Our events are free. The only TEDx community that ever charged for an event in Slovenia, was the one in Maribor, with a fee of 20 eur and Celje charged 8 eur once, as far as I know. I think that is pretty awesome, that we're keeping our events free and involving companies to sponsor the event. We’re also making events with super low budgets. While talking to some foreign TEDx organizers, I couldn’t believe the budgets I heard they're operating with. We keep it simple and sustainable.
   
   
4. We keep TEDx local, which means, that most of our speakers are slovenians and are from local community to local community. I think that foreign speakers represent around 5 % of all our past speakers and I think that makes sense. It's also environmentally friendly.
   
   
5. We are not very international and we're not involved in international TEDx community. Since TEDxActive and similar events are quite expensive, our team doesn’t attend international gatherings, such as summit will be in Canada this year. We were a part of TEDx weekend in Vienna and we hope to go to more events like this one in Europe.
   
   
   You must think that I'm some kind of TEDx fanatic. I love the idea, the concept of ideas worth sharing, I love working with speakers, meeting interesting people and organizing TEDx events in Ljubljana. I even did my bachelor thesis on an example of TEDx organizers under the topic of organizational identification (my thesis in slovenian, here).
   However, TEDx community is far from perfect and here are some strange things I'd love to see change:
   
   
   TED is awesome, but at the same time quite elitistic. Event are really expensive and prices of attendance fees don’t change, if you’re from US or from Moldavia. TED Active events mostly happen in US or Canada and cost around $2000 for TEDx organizers + you have to pay your plane ticket. That's so not going to work out from someone from Slovenia, with an average salary of 1000 eur. Not mentioning someone from Moldavia with average salary of 150 eur? I think TED could adapt the prices and take care of equality, with so many speakers on stage exposing it an an important issue in 21st century.
   
   
   TED is also quite american. Which means, that sometimes they are a bit unflexible. For example, they allow only one event per University. That might make sense for US, but how can you limit a number of student TEDx events per university in a country, such as Slovenia? In the whole country, we have 3 universities. After I started TEDxFDV and Urska started TEDxUniversityofLjubljana, they’ve been complaining about 2 events under the same university for last 3 years. Now, TEDxFDV will officialy never happen again. Luckily, we know how to continute with good things and since we all know each other anyway, now there will be TEDxUniversityofLjubljana event on FDV, Faculty of social sciences.
   
   
   TED is quite stuck on the concept of license and the person behind it. That is the person, that holds the license for a local event. Don’t get me wrong, I totally support the system and agree, that they have to "control" TEDx events as much as they can, so that random local TEDx events don't damage the TED brand.
   
   
    Again, in our example, concept of license holder is very limiting. Let’s see, what happens, if a person decides to not have an active role in a TEDx community anymore. For example, Matej Golob was main license holder of TEDxLjubljana for past few years. After an event in 2014, he decided he won't be active anymore. But since he was a person from our team, that attended TED conference in Edinburgh and his attendance actually allowed us to organize events bigger then 100 attendees, we came to a problem. If he isn’t applying as a licensee, we can start from 0 - with events for less then 100 attendees. And when we somehow manage to get one of our members to attend TED, so we should spend around $3000, we can organize events for more then 100 people. 
   With experienced team, 20 events organized and tickets for our event, that are gone in 1 second, we of course could not take this step back. So, to make TEDx license people happy, Matej Golob is still the one applying for license, which is both annoying for him and our team. But, it is easier for TED to trust our team, if a known name applies the event, i guess. Anyway, please TEDx, there are other people in TEDxLjubljana team, that have organized +20 events in past 5 years, so relax. And rethink your system.
   
   
   I highly recommend you to visit ted.com and watch some of the amazing content, that is avaliable online, for free. Also, if you haven't attended any local TEDx events in your region, I highly encourage you to do it. For me, TEDx events are kind of like a brain orgasm. :)