A Tunisian flag in a razor wire barricade near the center of Tunis
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.
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As far as paying suppliers goes, things are also a bit different than you might find elsewhere in the world. Invoices and checks? Not so much. While many of the social functions of Tunis are in remarkably good order after the revolution, long payment terms and credit around money aren’t really part of the program. Cold, hard cash up front is the rule here if you want to get things done in any kind of effective manner.
This doesn’t just apply to big things like audio and video production, but also the smallest of matters. When we first got to the venue, none of the restrooms had soap or toilet paper, basics that you’d expect to be provided as part of renting a venue. Anything that we brought in—even for our own needs while setting up the day before the event—was quickly removed by the staff. Apparently the proper mechanism for getting such necessities involved all sorts of official paperwork. I’m not sure how things eventually got handled, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the real mechanism involved some small payments of one kind or another from the cash reserve.
Whatever it took, the job got done. Despite failing projectors, glitchy lights, and equipment that needed maintenance, everything came together just at the right time. Well, almost everything. The caterer that was supposed to provide evening snacks after the event was a no show. Luckily, attendees took the news in stride with a “well, that’s Tunis” shrug and headed off into the night happy with thoughts of the event and what people had said.
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.
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The interview was a polyglot one in Tunisian Arabic, French, and English. Houssem handled the bulk of the questions about the TED@Tunis event in a mix of Arabic and French—appropriate as he was the event’s local producer, but Zied turned to Shawn, Nate, and I in English to get our stories and find out more about TED and TEDx. He was really interested in how the TED and TEDx phenomenon is spreading throughout the world. There were a few questions about TED that we had to pass on answering, but luckily Zied didn’t mind us redirecting to our own personal experiences and points of view.
Our initial fifteen minute time slot was bumped a bit by coverage of Francois Hollande’s election victory in France, but once we were on the air, we ended up talking with Zied for almost an hour as our discussion led to the local TEDxCarthage team and the fact that Hans Rosling was soon arriving in the country to meet with locals. Zied’s face lit up at this last bit of news and you could tell that he would be happy to put aside any other commitment to see Hans during his time in Tunis.
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.
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At TEDxSummit last month, I made friends with TEDx organizers from all over the world who invited me to their events to see what is happening. Two of these friends are Elena Papadopoulou and Katerina Biliouri, part of the team that organizes TEDxThessaloniki in Greece. Even though it was short notice, everything lined up along with the TED@Tunis event last week and I was able to be back on a plane to Europe to attend, as well as spend some time getting to know a part of the world I’ve not yet been able to spend any time in.
Watching the TEDxThessaloniki team pull together their event has been much like watching any of the other talented teams I’ve seen pull together other events. Long hours. Late nights. Much coffee. It all came together magnificently on May 12th at the Olympion Theater into a world class TEDx event that was everything a TED-like event should be: inspiring, motivating, and thought provoking. Attendees were brimming with excitement and passion all the way through the day to the final performance.
The theme of the event was The Courage to Create, an exploration of what it takes to make something exceptional in a time of great change. It’s a very apt theme at this point in Greece’s history where it takes courage to keep dreaming and persevering, even when it may seem challenging or even impossible. The conference’s promotional video by director Marios Spiroglou brilliantly illustrates the theme.
My favorite talk of the day was given by Czech economist Tomáš Sedláček, who explained the fundamentals of the current European woes in a way that brilliantly illustrates that what is happening here in Greece isn’t unique but is symptomatic of larger systemic issues that are at work both in the European and global economies. It was the kind of talk that leaves you with a new viewpoint on how things work. After his talk, I exercised my privilege as an attendee to talk one-on-one with Tomáš a bit more about the points he brought up and was impressed with his insights. He’s definitely somebody I want to have a long dinner conversation with sometime and would love to see speak again.
Another speaker that really stood out for me was Edi Rama, the Mayor of Tirana, Albania. As mayor, he’s overseen the removal of illegal buildings, the revitalization of the city by bringing in color and arts into the public space, and implemented projects to reduce corruption by replacing governmental service outlets with modern clean facilities that promote official accountability. I have no idea if I agree with the rest of his politics, but his talk was a great story of how seemingly minor changes in local government and how it acts can change a city for the better.
The event was conducted both in Greek and English with an almost even division between talks in each language. For locals who didn’t speak English well or non-Greek speakers, like myself, there was simultaneous translation provided. Translating big idea talks in real-time had to be a very challenging thing to do, and the translators didn’t quite keep up with every thought, but I was able to follow almost everything with ease.
It was quite a treat to leave most of the photography of the event to the local team who are posting photos of the event on Flickr. To help out a bit a few days before the event, I gave a repeat of the Photographing your TEDx Event workshop that Mike Femia and I created for TEDxSummit in Doha. Of course, I couldn’t resist making a few photos of my own, which are also in the Flickr set and appear here. It would be kind of strange if I didn’t at least make a few photos while I attended the event and conversed with people about issues small and large.
Exhilarating. Wonderful. Tiring. A great day, no matter how one looks at it. More than anything, it’s wonderful to see people implement the spreading of ideas in their own communities and spheres of influence. It’s something that the world can definitely use more of.
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.
]]>His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
I was in my usual position at the edge of the stage. One camera in hand and another at my side, but there was more on my mind than usual. The words to the song hit home.
He’s nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready to drop bombs,
but he keeps on forgetting what he wrote down
You see, I wasn’t just photographing the event. I was also a speaker at it. I’ve spoken on many a stage before, but this was different. I’ve never spoken in front of Chris Anderson, TED’s curator, or Kelly Stoetzel, TED’s program director—both of whom I admire greatly.
One speaker went up and spoke. Then another. Then another. Photographing the other speakers before I spoke was both a blessing and a curse. It kept me from thinking too much about my talk, but trying to multitask making photos and keeping tabs on when I should get ready to go on stage was a bit stressful.
Feet fail me not, this may be the only opportunity that I got
As they mic’d me up, I handed my camera off to Houssem—the organizer of the event—and took a minute to stop thinking about making photographs and refocus myself. Closing my eyes, breathing deeply, I cleared my mind. I was sure that the stage crew thought I was totally freaking out, but I didn’t have time to worry about that much. I was busy finding that peculiar calm that you only know of if you’ve been about to step out on a stage. I heard Chris introduce me as TED’s longtime photographer who had made an interesting observation and wanted to share it. It was time. I walked out into the lights.
Leyla’s photo—made in Doha last month—came up behind me on screen. For just a moment, my mind was too blank. And then, the intro I’d rehearsed came out:“Here’s a photo I made of a friend of mine recently. She’s beautiful in it, but as soon as she saw it, she disliked it even though everyone else in the room loved it…” Knowing how you’re going to start is simply the best insurance you can have as a speaker. It leads you to the rest of your talk.
I continued on: “She’s not the only one that’s had this kind of reaction. It’s actually quite common and I’ve long wondered why. Now, I’m not a scientist, but one of the perks of being a photographer at TED is that I’ve had access to talk about this with lots of really smart scientists.”
It was a short talk—I’m personally a fan of the quick small talk and I had edited this content down to its bare essentials. I’ll leave the rest of it a mystery until it comes out online later this summer when the worldwide talent search wraps up. Three minutes and change after taking the stage, I was done and greeted by generous applause from the audience. What a rush. It was easily the best time I’ve had on stage in a long time. Of course that’s so very easy to say in retrospect.
Achievement unlocked: TED Audition Speaker.
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.
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Late last night, I arrived at my second stop on my current trip: Tunisia—home of the Arab Spring’s first revolution. I’m here along with Nate Mook at the invitation of our fellow TEDxSummit staffer and TEDxCarthage organizer Houssem Aoudi. He invited us to come out, spend a bit of time, learn more about his home country, and check out the TED@Tunisia event he’s producing next week. Of course, I have cameras in hand and will be sharing a glimpse of our experience here.
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.
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The San Francisco Bay remains one of my favorite places in the world to fly over. It was my home for many years and I’ve found myself there so many times since that it remains very much a home to my heart. I know this area probably better than any other place on Earth. When I look out the window on approach, it only takes me a second to figure out where we are and what path the aircraft is flying to the airport. Even now, post this from Northern Africa, my heart jumps a little bit as I went through these photographs.
These photos were made on the first leg of my current trip from Portland to San Francisco, before connecting onto Frankfurt and experiencing itinerary screw up from hell. We came in over Pt. Reyes, cut across San Francisco and out over the bay, then made a right hand U-turn over the San Mateo bridge to land at SFO.
It’s a beautiful approach and one that is almost always the one flown when travelling from the north, including when you fly in from Portland, Seattle, and many flights in from Europe that fly the polar routes up and over Greenland and the far north of Canada. For the best chance of a view of the Golden Gate bridge and downtown, sit on the left hand side of the aircraft. But the right hand side—the side I was sitting on while making these photos—isn’t bad either.
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.
]]>With over thirty parties in the running—many of them only seriously competing for the first time—everyone is trying to weigh the pros and cons of each and are intensely curious as to what the others are thinking. Complicating matters is the fact that a party has to win at least 3% of votes in order to be seated, so if you vote for a fringe party that gets less than that, your vote doesn’t have the same effect. It makes for a complex political calculus to think through before stepping into the voting booth and casting a ballot.
One distinct difference from most elections I’ve ever seen is that with all the new parties in the running, the conversations are rather more open-minded and full of honest consideration of more viewpoints than most political discussions I’ve had in the past. Instead of having a glossy high-level sound-bite debate about big versus small government knowing all along that it’s all mostly moot, like it is in the coporatocractic United States, the conversations are about making serious and fundamental choices that will viscerally change the course of the country’s future. The reason for this, of course, is the economic crisis. Everyone has been affected by the financial distress and austerity measures. Everyone has seen their take-home pay cut. Everyone knows the election will help define the next few decades for Greece. And, none of the choices are easy ones for anybody to make.
Most of the people I’ve talked to are still deciding. Regardless of how tough the choices are—and I know that I wouldn’t know which way I’d cast a ballot if I were participating—on May 6th Greece will vote and the outcome will have an interesting and fascinating ramifications for the Greeks, the Euro, and even the European project as a whole. I’m actually a bit bummed that I won’t be in Greece when it happens, but I’ll be back on May 9th and am very curious to see how the discussions will have changed.
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.
]]>As you know, our relationship has never been about mutual attraction or even pleasure in companionship. It’s been about reliability, predictability, and deep understanding and acceptance of your quirks. For over the last decade along with your Star Alliance partners, you’ve provided me with adequately predictable worldwide service, taken care of things quickly and efficiently when problems came up, provided the right status and perks for my frequent flying needs, and have been easy to deal with in how you operate once I got to know you and learned how to avoid your rougher personality traits. No US-flag carrier with global reach is a standout, but you’ve done well enough by me that I’ve stuck with you for over 700,000 miles of travel.
This year after your hook up with Continental, something’s changed. Things are worse. The reliability of knowing how things work is gone. Handling of problems is erratic. Your IT changes have complicated your Star Alliance integration. You can’t even seem to send me a current Mileage Plus card that shows my Star Alliance Gold status so that I can access my privileges on partner airlines without lots of friction. And today, well today has been inexcusable. In fact, I have to say that it’s been the most unreasonably unfortunate flight day I’ve had in a very long time. The only other times I’ve had flight days this bad were due to understandable external problems like weather or volcanoes erupting. Today, it was just plain simple incompetence and a complete failure to do the sorts of things that were once so easy for you to do.
Here’s the play by play:
So, United, to summarize: After many IT-related bungles, you sent me to Athens on a ticket that couldn’t get me to my final destination. You left me stuck in Athens without a straightforward and appropriate path to resolution. I had to go so far as to buy my own last-minute ticket to my final destination because you essentially stranded me. And, I have no clue as to what the state of the rest of my ticket is right now and won’t until I sit down somewhere with Internet access and Skype into your customer service lines.
To say I’m disappointed would be an understatement…
As I write this in the Aegean lounge at Athens, I haven’t a clue as to what you could do to make this right. You could make a start by refunding the miles I used to get here to Europe and the €120 I paid for my final flight to Thessaloniki, but that’s only a start. This won’t be better until you get your systems back to the point where they work as smoothly as they were before you merged them. Continental’s systems were working fine before the IT merger. So were United’s. But at this point, when an ex-Continental agent who knows their way around SHARES sends a customer on a flight that strands them in a place with no direct support, something is just horribly broken. I have several more flights on Star Alliance partners booked through your system in the next two weeks that I’m now very concerned about going smoothly. And, I have little faith that they will.
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.
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The theme of the event was “The power of x”. The meaning of the x was left purposefully undefined, an exercise to be interpreted as one desired. You could follow the lead of the marketing for the event and think of it in terms of more x. For example, “If your airplane had more x, you’d have arrived yesterday”. Or, you could think of it in math terms of exponential power amplifying TED’s mission of ideas worth spreading. At some point during the event, I started thinking of the x as meaning connection. The kind of connection that brings together people all over the world in the kind of way that’s only become possible recently with the rise of the Internet.
Three years after its launch, TEDx is at a defining moment. When Chris Anderson and the TED team launched TEDx, there was no way to know that it would come so far so fast. Over three thousand events later, it might just be a movement. Some definitely want to see it as such. Others want to take it further and move beyond being a platform for spreading ideas and become a vehicle for implementing ideas.
I’m of two minds on this. Expanding scope could potentially dilute the focus and energy that has been found. In addition, there’s not that much formal organization in this community yet and moving into implementation might prove to be unmanageable. Furthermore, part of the power of the existing platform is that it lets ideas mingle without much in the way of vested interest for any one idea. I fear that implementing under the TEDx banner some ideas might block others. That’s not to say that people shouldn’t implement ideas, just that it might be best to leave any implementation as an effort that pursues its own path, like seeds sown to the wind to find their own independent destiny.
On the other hand, maybe we should actively cultivate some of our best ideas. TED does this with the TEDPrize where an idea per year gets focused on. Maybe something similar can grow within the TEDx community. As long as such efforts don’t interfere with the connection and recombination of ideas, there’s likely little harm in it and probably a lot to be gained. The open question is what kind of structure needs to form to support such an undertaking.
That structure, one way or another, will emerge. Relationships that existed before this event were strengthened. New ones that will last a lifetime were forged. No matter what happens with the TED and TEDx labels, I have no doubt that things—important things—will happen in the world because of the connections made last week. Hyperbole? I don’t think so. I’ve had the privilege of watching amazing things happen in the ocean conservation community as a result of the people who gathered in the Galapagos for Mission Blue two years ago, another event that was transformative and seminal for everyone involved. Most of those things haven’t occurred under either the TED or Mission Blue umbrellas, but they were enabled by connections forged among a small group of people in a week on the water. Multiply that kind of effect by the diversity and number of people at TEDxSummit and I have no doubt that we’re going to see some amazing things that can track their roots through Doha in April of 2012.
Maybe the elusive meaning of x is a bit of everything. Exponentially connected, we’re the human network and we’re figuring out what we can do together. Maybe we’re the power of x.
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.
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]]>“Nope. Sorry, you’re not getting that one. We’re giving you something else.”
“Oh really? What is it?”
“Don’t worry about it. You’ll love it.”
It was definitely one of those moments where you know that a treat is about to be given to you and you should just shut up and enjoy it. Oh, lordy. Did I enjoy it, indeed. Loved it. Holy moly.
I think it was one of the best cappuccinos I’ve had in a very long time. Rich. Complex. With maybe a hint of bourbon and a slightly pleasing sort of smokey flavor I’m not sure how the hell to describe because I’m not quite that geeky with my taste discrimination. Amazing.
Today, I went back:
“So, um, what was the name of that really tasty stuff you gave me yesterday?”
“Why you gotta be like that? Don’t mess it up like that. Just enjoy it…”
Catching on to the game, I leaned in close and said:
“Fair enough. I don’t care what the hell it was called. I just want another one…”
I thought for a moment, decided I might have been slightly too brusque and direct and maybe even a bit demanding in my tone, so I added with my best smile:
“Please…?”
Would you believe it was even better today than yesterday? Incredible. It’s that kind of thing that you look over at the barista, give a knowing nod, and get the nod back. I took a photo of it, but I think it’s better if I don’t give away too much about where to find this magic cup. I just hope that they have a little bit of it left over tomorrow before I leave town again on Sunday.
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.
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