With the third annual TEDx Chatham-Kent barely in the books, organizers are already looking ahead to next year.
John Lyons, who along with Fannie Vavoulis, Kathy Hoffman and Peter Martin, produced this year’s TEDx, said they already have a theme in mind, and are driven to make it even better than this year’s offering.
Speaking of themes, “Driven” was this year’s underlying commonality.
A total of 19 speakers and performers addressed the crowd at the Oct. 20 TEDx at the John D. Bradley Convention Centre.
“It was awesome. That was our busiest day yet,” he said.
This time around, while the producers approached a number of people to see if they’d be interested in speaking, they also put out a call for speakers. More than half the folks who spoke or performed at the event answered the call. In fact, the response was so great, they had to turn people away.
“We don’t take everybody; we only took 11 of the more than 30 applicants,” Lyons said. “We were looking for diversity in our panel and wanted to make sure each was topical to our theme.”
That selection process played a big part in Adam Ludolph taking the stage this year.
“Adam was one of my favourite speakers. He actually applied last year and didn’t make it,” Lyon said, adding Ludolph’s story on battling mental illness didn’t quite fit the Food for Thought theme.
Lyons said while this was the third annual TEDx here, there was an 18-month gap between events this time around.
“We had done them previously in the spring. It was too risky with the weather. We needed to mitigate that risk, so we moved it to when the weather would be a little nicer,” he said.
And now, next year already looms. Well, it’s lurking somewhere over the horizon, actually.
“We’re all super pumped for next year already. We always look back and say, ‘We should have done this,’ ‘we should have done that,’” Lyons said. “At the end of the day, it’s all about our speakers and the ideas and what they are saying.”
Lyons pledged the producers would continue to seek out “amazing speakers” for future TEDx CK events.
“We really feel the experience and we want to keep growing, so you’re not just walking in and plunking your butt down. We want you to be inspired,” he said. “We want to amp it up a bit next year.”
