Last Thursday we held TEDxKreuzberg over at Betahaus. Now after a couple of days of recovery and some more travel (I’m writing this while in Karlsruhe, where I’ll be based for the next few weeks), it’s time to share some impressions.
Short-short version: I loved it! The crowd was great as were the vibes, and I had a number of really interesting discussions. Plus, I met a bunch of very cool & interesting folks. So thanks a lot to everybody for showing up and making the night what it was. Also, thanks a lot to my co-host Christoph Fahle and the Betahaus crew – you guys rock!
For the more in-depth version, I’d like to add to the above some notes as well as share some feedback I got during and after the event. The one point that came up a number of times was that we had almost too much content. With seven talks, it was a lot of ideas to digest. That’s a very good point and I agree – should we get to organize another TEDxKreuzberg, we’ll aim for five talks. That way, we’ll have more time in between sessions to meet people, to digest, discuss and exchange ideas.
I was glad to notice that – as far as I can tell – the language mix didn’t seem to be much of a problem: we had some presentations in German, but most in English. The audience, also quite international, didn’t seem to mind that a couple of talks were in German while the German share of the audience seemed happy with following the event in English. Running events bilingually is something that I’ve always been somewhat nervous about, but it worked out fine – good to know for the future.
Betahaus turned out to be a great location for this kind of event. The atmosphere was informal & intimate, which I think helps people feeling at easy and making a connection to one another. Even though we set up the space only the same afternoon, it all went pretty much as smooth as I could have hoped for. We’ll have to see how the videos turned out, but we’ll know within a couple of days.
To cut a long story short, allow me to go back to the beginning of this post: I loved it. And I hope you enjoyed it, too. We’ll be trying to improve further, of course, so keep the feedback coming, here in the comments or via the more official TEDxKreuzberg communication channels. Thanks!
ps. for some more impressions, check out Christoph’s post on the Betahaus blog, this post where we collect photos and videos, or ask Teh Google.
Photo: Rik Mayda (Thanks!)
