Jessica Mah These comments are inevitable, so I'm not here to censor :)

Many people don't see the value in paying the money to attend a TED event. After all, why not just watch the talks for free on the TED.com website?

I think a similar question exists when deciding on whether it's worth seeing a musician perform live. People pay $1k+ to see Miley Cyrus, why don't they just buy her CD?

Just some food for thought. There's no right or wrong answer.

On another note, TEDxBerkeley talks will be on our website available for anyone to view, 100% free.

chris Mary Hodder et el, you know who you are, and I know you are reading this, since Plancast sends email updates. Apologize if you made a mistake. This is a public place and because of you, I first had very bad image about TedxBerkley before the organizers themselves came and talked about it here. You can't just go to public places and talk trash about people who work hard, without knowing much.

Kristy Graves Hub Berkeley hosting overflow viewing around corner at David Brower Center - 2150 Allston Way. http://tedxberkathub.eventbrite.com.

Bilal Ahmed Is rocking. Amazing crowd :)

Chris Cinelli Wow! They can accommodate 700+ people. At $99 that sum up to $70k! TEDx events should not be use to make money according TED policy.

These are my 2 cents on the TEDxBerkeley:

Tickets for TEDxBerkeley are $99 (or $500 for front rows). Why? And is it worth it?

1) A chance to make easier (if not easy) money even if they could not. As Jessica Mah said, "this conference is not run by TED in anyway". So why exactly they called it TEDx???. TED endorse them (http://www.ted.com/pages/view?id=348). If it is not a franchising, it is a way to spread the TED brand and let more people enjoy a TED-like event... but what is the motivation for local organizers?
Organizing a big event like this is always a great things on the resume but my suspect is that some people found a way to get some sunshine under the TED reflected light and get A LOT of money from these events.

According to http://www.ted.com/pages/view/id/351 "Cost/tickets: You may not use your TEDx event to make money. Admission must be free for most events. TED will allow certain TEDx events to charge a small admission fee -- always under $100 -- to help cover the event's production costs. In order to charge attendees you must request permission from TED first."

I am not sure $500 tickets are not violating TEDx requirements but now, Wheeler Auditorium in Berkeley has a capacity of 760 seats (http://facilities.calperfs.berkeley.edu/rental.php). The event is sold out according to http://tedxberkeley.org/register . Now considering that there will be some free people, the money collected for the event will be more than (700 * $99) about $70,000 (not considering the $500 tickets).
Where did they spend $70k? I guess the speakers are paid... right... a lot. Someone ,must ask the organizers where they are spending all this money !

2) It is not probably worth the money: TED conferences (no TEDx) are well known for an unbalance demand/supply equilibrium. Very high demand and low supply justify the $6,000 tickets that are already sold out for the next year (see http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/09/ted-now-with-more-elitism/ ). Why are people willing to pay that much? Elitism? Maybe... I think the real value is not for the content shared on the stage (that is available online for free) but for the opportunity to network with so many top-notch people all in the same place.

So the question is "Is TEDxBerkeley event worth $100+ ?". It depends. Who is attending it? I wonder if there will be more Very Important People or people that want to feel in the elite of who went to a TED event. Furthermore in Silicon Valley is pretty easy to meet key people at free or nearly free events.
Well, 700 people are a lot! I guess I will find out if it was worth the money for them =)

chris I am in no way affiliated with these guys but I think you should all apologize to the team, and this doesn't change although you say you didn't know about some facts. Do some research before leaving trolling comments.

kai chang @MaryHodder

This entire "White Men" charge is frankly, this is probably one of the puzzling accusation in the thread. The highest-ranking executive at TEDxBerkeley is a woman of color (Jessica Mah). I am co-leading a management team of 50% women. I'm not white. Neither is our Director of Logistics. Nearly half of our speakers are nonwhite. I am genuinely flummoxed how such an accusation can form in anyone's mind.

If you saw the list of 100+ hopeful speakers that my co-curator and I had to review, it would look like a country club; we had to reject more white men than any other demographic. It would appear we didn't reject enough white men for Mary's satisfaction. Sorry.

"Adding 3 women is great.. but why weren't those women added at the beginning?"

The women speakers we have in our lineup were already invited, interviewed and prepped for months. We are deliberate in choosing the sequence of we announce speakers (as mentioned in my response above to Shirley). The sequence of announcements was timed to the rising level of internet traffic we'd experience in the days leading up to the event. Where would *you* showcase women speakers during the timeline?

The notion that my female-minority-CEO, 50% female management team is a bunch of racist sexists who deliberately chose to exclude women/minorities and sought to populate our speaker lineup with white men is absurd and wrong. In addition, this narrative that the TEDxBerkeley team originally intended to have an all-male lineup, then frantically scrambled to add women when somebody on the internet called us out on our "All White Male" lineup is laughable - our women speakers were a part of our lineup MONTHS before this entire dustup came to being.

Given the enormous popularity of TEDxBerkeley, we are most definitely planning another event soon (tentatively six months). We've learned a tremendous amount during this process and I guarantee you our next event will be more transparent, more inclusive, and larger to accommodate more attendees (but if our anticipated projections are correct, we will likely still be forced to turn away thousands of brilliant, thoughtful folks due to space constraints).

You are welcome to apply to participate (announcements will be made on the website). Thoughtful dissent and input are most definitely welcome (and we've been getting a lot of excellent constructive criticism that we are incorporating into our notes for the next event).

All that said (and as I mentioned elsewhere) - the two days prior to an event are critical for our already-overworked management team to finalize the thousand details we need to nail down.

I would like to spend the remaining shreds of time we have left to help our speakers (including the three women) shine.

Mary - from the time/date stamps on our respective messages, it appears you went ahead and replied to Jessica without reading my response to Shirley since you erroneously went ahead citing things I've already clarified in my message above. Please take the time to read through everything so we're all on the same page. We want a great event with inspiring speakers that reflect the best of Berkeley.

I am intimately aware of the thousand ways April 3rd event is imperfect. Such is the nature of first-time conferences. Our next event will be better, in every metric; with thoughtful input from the community and your help, we shall make it so.

Thank you.

mary hodder @jessicamah I think you are missing the point here.. I didn't think your TedXBerkeley event was run by TED.. they just license you the name, logo and association to you. What I do believe is that as a member of the UC Berkeley community, you would use school resources in ways that would match what the school, a public school, is about.

Having a non-transparent, rather subjective acceptance process for speakers and attendees, which is obviously upsetting to those who applied and can't really find out how you had decided on who should attend, until your note above, is one problem. Your note above says that it's just *you*.. deciding.. subjectively. Which likely will make even more people upset.. because for a UC to host a desirable event which is just about one person's subject assessment about who should attend, or speak (a small committee I assume is choosing speakers) with no real criteria does strike many as inherently unfair and biased and at odd with UC principles.

It's also a great way to make it so that hundreds of people don't like you very much, though that probably isn't your intention.

If it's true that you and your small group were upset by the criticisms, which you took some time to respond to.. well.. I would say that hosting an event for 700 associated with TED would likely bring some criticism, and you should be both prepared for it, and respond quickly with answers that address the issues in the criticisms instead of other issues that aren't really a problem.

I don't care if TedXBerkeley is run by TED.. I know it's run by you and your group. What I care about is that a public university show itself off with a better standard for fairness and equity across classes and populations.. so that diverse points of view are showcased.

Simply being a minority woman, who then chooses a bunch of mostly white men to showcase, doesn't mean you get a pass for our lack of imagination about how to present a lot of points of view to really cover a subject in a smart way with breadth and depth.

Adding two women, even if you thought it might be "helpful" to announce them at the last minute, kind of looks like tokenism and frankly like you rushed them in at the last minute to quell criticism.

The reality is, there are are lot of view points a place like Berkeley can showcase.. and only showing *one* viewpoint, as your speaklist conveyed until yesterday (and now has another view), means the conference looks like it won't be very interesting at least to those who want to hear from a lot of different kinds of people. This on top of the other issues about how you created an exclusive event hosted at a public university (which we all pay for.. even the poor people who aren't so exclusive or exciting) where you are the singular decider for who attends a 700 person event at UC Berkeley.

This isn't Long Beach.. I'm really disappointed by your answer above. I hope that sometime you will come to understand that having diverse world views at an event is not about affirmative action, that seeking to program those views isn't about promoting people who aren't qualified but instead about having imagination and going outside your own comfort zone and knowledge base, to create something that is inclusive with quality. This is is a lot harder than keeping out the riff raff with exclusivity, but I think you should consider it.

Otherwise, what makes you different than Stanford or LongBeach? Why have TedXBerkeley? Why not change what TED does now to create something that really inspires people that is unique to Berkeley and shows off great people who wouldn't make the usual TED list? I know UCBerkeley has them.. and more than what I listed above.. did you consider any of them? Did you consider anyone outside your own zone of comfort?

kai chang Rather than paraphrasing, you can quote me directly. Since you haven't, I'll do so myself. I said:

====

Three women speakers were already part of our lineup for months. We are deliberate in choosing the sequence of we announce speakers.

If you looked at our web analytics, you'd see interest/traffic in a conference website is a slow crawl months away, and rise exponentially as the date of the event approaches (we are now hundreds of pages an hour - three months ago, we'd serve a hundred pages a DAY).

Given all that, if you wanted the women in the speaker lineup to get maximum exposure, when would *you* disclose/announce the name of the women speakers during this timeline?
======

As to your points:

1. You conveniently ignored the portion of my message to you where I said: Wouldn't a thoughtful "hey, wouldn't it be nice if ..." style comment set a dignified, diplomatic tone that would communicate the exact same sentiments?

We welcome (and indeed insist) on thoughtful dissent. That is the very spirit of TED and is something we wish to capture in what we do. But how does strident, angry accusations of sexism (on my management team that is 50% women, whose #1-ranking executive is a woman of color) fit in to that narrative?

For all our attempts to bring in diverse perspectives, our April 3rd TEDxBerkeley event does not have any Black speakers either (and heaven knows I've spend close to 40 man-hours campaigning to bring in an amazing Zimbabwean to our speaker lineup but ultimately failed to do so). Should my team brace itself for a wave accusations by African-Americans denouncing us for being racists?

2. I have been working 80 hours a week for over a month nonstop putting this event together. My team has been logging similar hours. We have ONE PR professional (another woman!) who happens to be among the few whose non-TEDx commitments prevent her from devoting as many hours as everyone else who *would* have been in the position to respond more swiftly.

My team (and I am so proud of them) are working so hard, and we were frankly blindsided by factually-false accusations. If you wish to condemn us for failing to snap to attention on command to every factually-false accusation on the internet I will apologize on my team's behalf. I know we make plenty of mistakes during the course of planning our event (and heaven knows I make plenty of them myself), but why not summon a spirit of magnanimousness when you see others make what you feel are critical errors, and take a benevolent, positive stance? What do you hope to gain by taking a hostile, accusatory stance (which makes people reflexively feel defensive, whether you are factually right or not)?

3. While I personally have an exceptionally thick skin, my team was deeply hurt by some of the vile and profanity-laced accusations leveled against us here, and elsewhere on the internet. Whatever else our shortfalls, they do not deserve this sort of abuse and I am very protective of them; if you wish to hear me condemn my staff for not being 100% perfect in all ways, you'd do well to prepare yourself for disappointment.

There are classy, thoughtful ways to bring to attention ways an organization can do better (and we have been listening closely to those who came to us in that spirit.

Legitimate complaints/concerns raised in a profane, hateful manner do NOT merit equal consideration as those same concerns raised in a thoughtful, helpful manner.

This dustup (which again, I must re-emphasize is based on the factually false claim that my 50% female, woman-executive-led team) is sexist and excluded women from speaker positions. That is just flat-out false. The accusers spoke from a place of ignorance. Could we have better communicated our lineup sequence? Sure. But it's perplexing to me why you'd dig in your heels and try to spin your false accusations as indeed "factually true, until more facts are revealed." No. Sometimes a statement is just simply wrong.

It has cost me and my team dozens of productive work hours in a week when we can spare none. It has hurt a number of my team's feelings that I had to step in and mollify. Would you rather I spend my very limited time further dissecting the rights and wrongs of these false accusations, or would you prefer that I devote the balance of my time to helping our speakers (including the three amazing women we've had on our speaker roll for months) shine?

Before you reply, I would encourage you to read the excellent (and short!) blog entry by Derek Sivers "A Real Person, a Lot Like You"

http://sivers.org/real

Shirley Lin @JessicaMah, @KaiChang, I've known you both personally, and therefore I never doubt your good intention for organizing this event. However, I received a post on my Facebook Wall from Kai where he claimed that "shrill and belligerent" critism caused him and your team hurtful feeelings and that were "strident accusations (which were factually untrue!) made against" the team. Like many incidents of PR disasters that some big brands had painfully paid a huge cost for, as in any PR or customer relation management books, there are lessons to be learned from this incident:

1) Lack of transparency of your intention or plan. It has nothing to do with the affirmative action or not. Any one who looked at the speaker list 5 days before the event and saw that there was not one single woman on the list would legitmately challenge that fact. We are in 21st Century. Not 1940's. Kai said it was a deliberate effort to announce the female speakers in the last few days prior to the event in order to garner maximum attention. Well, no one outside you team knew about your intention. In the public space, it's not your intention, it's the perception that matters in the public's mind. Communicate earlier with your audience on potentially sensitive issues like that.

2) Too slow to respond critism and thereby deepen the damage of your reputation/image. Respond immediately so people understand where and why you did it.

3) You can attack your opponent, but do not ever blame your customers when they raised complaints or concerns. And "customers" are not just those who registered to attend, they include all the people that this event has targeted as audience. Kai said those "accusations" were 'factually untrue". Well, before you presented the fact, there was only one fact to base on, namely the list of the speakers. And since there was no published "selection criteria", people would have to extrapolate the reasons for their being excluded. So you can't say people accused you b/c they were factually untrue. They were actually factually true, until you reveal further facts. You were in a position to contain the damage much earlier had you opted to act so.

That being said, my hat is off to you and your team for working so hard to make it happen. I'm sure a lot would agree with me - you deserve great appraises and commendament.

Jessica Mah This is Jessica Mah, the Curator of TEDxBerkeley. I'm an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley.

This conference is not run by TED in any way. I personally hand picked speakers, and was one of several people who read through the registrations.

I want to address the question about having fewer women speakers than male speakers -- I have no personal interest in affirmative action, and all of the women speaking/performing are fully qualified to do so, regardless of the fact that they're female. Gender had 0 factor into my choosing speakers, and it's great that we have 3 of them.

Next is the acceptance process. We didn't look at race or wealth in any way. When I say "we", I actually mean "myself". I decided to split the 600 available seats down the middle, allowing 300 students in, then 300 outsiders in. We prioritized students first, since this event is run by a student group on campus. After all the students got in, we started taking care of outsiders. The criteria included the following:

- passion for TED, regardless of having been to a TED event in the past.
- contributions to the world, passion for helping others.

And beyond that, we just had way too many applications. We didn't tell people why they didn't get an invitation because there frequently was no reason. We just don't have the space, and I mean that.

In fact, I tried to find us a bigger auditorium so we can let more people come. But Zellerbach was reserved by someone else on the same day/time of the event, so we had to manage with our original venue.

As I write this, we have hundreds of very qualified students who want to attend. I can't give them tickets not because they're poor or "un-TED-like", because the entire goal of my curating this event was to open up access to others. I think a lot about that, and I hope that you understand that it's something the TEDxBerkeley team thinks greatly about.

Best,
Jessica Mah

Shirley Lin @Mary, the new addition of a woman speaker Dr. Asma Abbas was added to TedXBerkeley's group page, after I posted on to the wall yday afternoon.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/TEDxBerkeley?ref=ts
However, I just found out that my post which indicated there is no single woman on the list, had been removed from that group page as of this morning.
I guess it's an intention from the group page owner to quell my simple question.

Bilal Ahmed i want my money back. just kidding :)

mary hodder Interesting.. a day has passed since Shirley (above) was told 3 women would be added to the speaker's list of TEDxBerkeley, but none have been added.

And no one.. and the TEDxBerkeley people must know about this thread, because they contacted Shirley... has bothered to respond here about what's going on with the conference or regarding the speaker list or the opacity of the attendee process.

And yet they are using tax payer resources for this event. I just find this totally bizarre.

If this was a Stanford, it would be par for the course and I wouldn't have nearly the issue with TEDxBerkeley's exclusivity, but at Berkeley, it's really not right. And it's amazing the conference organizers don't think they need to respond to the criticisms.

Jonathan Fleming You ladies are right on the money, you make some great points! TED needs to open itself up to keep being more incredible and creative, good points, thanks for putting them out there! Hopefully, TED will expand its speaker's list so we don't see the old faces all the time!

Cathryn Hrudicka Here-here, I agree—what is up with this snobbish "application to attend," and then you really feel like a "reject" when you're rejected as a PAYING AUDIENCE MEMBER! I'm sorry to say, it seems like TED is very "clubby"—from what I've seen, it seems like you have to be the right kind of "cool," have the right geeky friends, have just written a best-selling book, be a "trendy" musician or artist, etc., and it doesn't even matter if you have a distinguished career or have won awards—if you're not in a certain narrow range of what they consider "cool." OK, I've had my 15 min. of complaints today, but when someone tells you you are not even free to pay to attend a conference, and other people who applied after you are accepted—you have to wonder—and question it. Back to my own work now, which will continue with or without TED's recognition.:-)

mary hodder Shirley.. adding 3 women is great.. but why weren't those women added at the beginning? why did they wait til we called them out on this? Kind of bad form to snap to attention onlly when you get caught doing a poor job.

Also.. what's with applications to attend? If they really want to have a discussion on doing the "unprecedented" they would make it possible for every person, regardless of ability to pay, who is excited about this topic and TEDxB to get there and make it work.

mary hodder I can think of a bunch of Berkeley people who might talk about "doing the unprecedented" like:
AnnaLee Saxenian - has written seminal books on immigration and innovation
Pam Samuelson - affects legislation across all levels for IP and Privacy law
Dierdre Mulligan - THE person to talk about privacy law and technology
Bob Bell - PhD at the iSchool UCB researching sustainable relationships with Kenya/Africa in IT
Cecilia Aragon - UCB CS PhD, LBL researcher and currently research HCI
Julie Wainwright (of Berkeley Systems fame)

It's very typical of conf. organizers to put out a call in one limited spot (their own website ? ! ?) and then look for their friends with the same perspectives as their own, and who look just like them.

If you want to fulfill the mission of a place like UCB and break out of Ted's exclusive upper middle class white people scene.. you have to think harder and do more than just post the call for speakers and attendees to your own site. You have to think about what kind of thing you really want:

your own self promotion and clubby atmosphere
or
something that touches people more deeply because it's not expected, not clubby and not the usual suspects blowing their own horns.

Shirley Lin Just got t note from the organizer that 3 women speakers/performers are being added and will be announced this week. Cool!

Shirley Lin To be fair, I know neither Jessica Mah nor Kai Chang or their crew are the exclusionary kind of person and they've been working really hard on this project. Maybe it's just an oversight? Hope it's not to late to make some corrective measurement.

Cathryn Hrudicka P.S. Mary and Shirley, it is ridiculous that there is not one woman on the panel, especially in Berkeley, and other "minorities" are also not represented. So far, no one from TED has responded to me yet, other than their claim that they had no room for me to attend (despite my registering early). We'll see...

Cathryn Hrudicka Mary, thanks for your support and comments—the issues you have pointed out are certainly part of my feeling about TED. When I watched the video clips from TED—SF, I felt similarly; I felt that many of the speakers and participants they showed were part of a "TED type," and I could think of a number of people who would be so much better qualified to talk about some of the issues discussed there, including people who would have been much more exciting speakers/facilitators. I think discrimination, especially covert, is one of the major issues of our time, and it is so ironic that in Berkeley, of all places, we are experiencing it. I'm tired of the TED snobbery, the inflated reputation, and the unwillingness of the TED followers to question it, most of all. When I tweeted about it today, no one responded. Disappointing indeed. We even need to question "the darlings" of the tech community if we want to really support change, creativity, innovation, and moving forward toward a better world.

mary hodder What's really odd is that of all places.. Berkeley.. which ought to be about inclusion and diversity, is hosting and professors are creating an exclusionary, exclusive white boys club with limited ideas and a self promoting tone in the content.

Not sure what to make of how this turned out and what it says about Berkeley.. but I think it shows the full gentrification of the University from it's mission of educating the masses, to essentially being like Stanford, without the bigger endowment. And my guess is that the people putting on TedXB won't even bother addressing why the best public university in the world is doing an event this way, with mostly older white guys speaking, an application process for attendees requiring an opaque approval process, and even less opacity in how they choose who presents what ideas.

It's really disappointing to see the University being used to host this and professors not doing more to fulfill the University's mission.

Shirley Lin Thanks to Mary for pointing out, now it's obvious. There is NOT ONE SINGLE WOMAN in this TedX. And it's in Berkeley!?! Can some one explain this kind of regressive phenomenon?

mary hodder Cathryn.. i'm not sure I want to go.. did you look at the speaker list? It's a sausage fest of old white guys telling us how great they are.

Boring.. and so not interested. I definitely have better things to do with my time than pay to attend that.

Cathryn Hrudicka P.S. I am really angry about this. I feel TED discriminates against people who do not fit a certain "type," age group, etc., plus they asked on the online app. if you work at UC Berkeley, are an alum, etc. I mentioned in parentheses that my husband works at UCOP, where students have protested recently. If anything, he has gone beyond his job classification trying to get UC to be more sustainable, save money and not spend unnecessarily, eliminate waste, etc., which translates into helping the students. However, in any case, I should not be judged on the basis of my husband's job, since I am not an employee or alum of U.C. Berkeley. What gives? I wonder if anyone at TED will respond—I have long felt that TED is discriminatory in a way that limits authentic dialogue across disciplines (and types of people) about the issues discussed at TED events (and maybe they need to discuss other issues as well by including more of a diversity of people).

Cathryn Hrudicka Unhappy news this a.m.—I was denied admission to @TEDxB with no explanation. Am I not the "TED type"? Is it #TED snobbery? Discrimination? I signed up early, so their email to me about having more applicants than spaces is bullshit.

Crystal Y. Right after TEDxBerkeley, there's a Marie Digby benefit concert in Berkman Hall organized entirely by undergrads. You should all come! :)
http://mariedigby.caldosomething.org/
Balcony tickets are only $6, VIP tickets (including meet and greet) $50, with various pricing levels in between. And YOU choose what (501)(3) charity to donate your ticket's proceeds to! :)

Chris McCann Sign up to attend here! http://tedxberkeley.org/?page_id=5