Hey, we are venue!

Most people come in contact with TED or TEDx on the internet. There are many videos on ted.com that educate, inspire and astonish people throughout the world. The TED events themselves do not take place on the internet. They require a real physical location with real physical people. That might seem obvious, but because most of the things that we know about TED is from watching videos on the internet, it actually requires a change of perspective when we want to understand how to host a TEDx event, which eventually will result in a couple of videos being uploaded on ted.com. But these videos are only part of the puzzle.

Our group is responsible for finding the venue where we will host the TEDx event. We are currently limited to 100 visitors plus staff and we want them and us to have a nice experience and a good time. So a lot of planning is required to find the right environment where everything will take place. TEDx events are similar to TED events and have to follow certain regulations. The TEDx manual states that a TEDx event can be hosted at any kind of place.

However, the place itself should make it easy for people to share ideas and create personal connections. This does not only apply to the speakers but also to the visitors of the event. Therefore we were looking for a place that is big enough but at the same time provides incentives for everyone to get together and exchange ideas, thoughts and experiences.

It really helps to do brainstorming. Our team has assembled a long list of venues and we checked through different characteristics for each place. Next, we started to contact the people in charge of these locations to enquire if these places were still available on the 5th of December. As it turns out, even half a year before the event many locations are already booked. So it really makes sense to start very early to look for locations. We presented the remaining locations to the rest of our TEDx team and we got even more good suggestions for which we did background checks.

We are very happy that we have been able to successfully complete this task and we are looking forward for all the other things that still need to be done like the design of the stage, solving technical issues, planning the catering, and quite a few more.