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MEMO TO PARTICIPANTS
re: CONVERSATIONS

As most of you are aware, I created TED in 1984 and
chaired it through 2002. During that time I created
TEDMED in 1995 and the eg Conference in 2006. For
all those meetings I developed an 18-minute talk and
a series of rules called the TED Commandments.

Several of you have asked 'well what are the new
guidelines as they relate to the WWW Conference'?

1 Participants have all been sent the schedule
listing the person with whom they have
been paired, attached again below.
2 If you go to the participants page on the web
site, you can click on that person's name and link
to his or her biographical information.
3 I have developed a list of 30 different premises or
postulations that will begin you in improvised conversation.
4 I have tried this and it works.
5 You will be facing each other on comfortable
couches and not the audience.
6 There will be approximately 150 people in the
audience, which will be comprised of fellow participants,
guests and individuals invited by sponsors.
7 Absolutely no preparation is necessary.
8 You will not be selling a book, charity, project or religion.
9 As long as the conversation holds my attention and
my perceived attention of the audience, you will be in
conversation. At the conclusion, I will with reasonable
politeness call up the next two individuals.
10 If the conversation is fabulous but goes on so long
as to potentially cause us to miss our lunch, I will also
end it and the two of you can continue it over lunch.
11 There will be no lectern but there will be a side
table for a cup of coffee or glass of water.
12 There is no strict time schedule but I will
attempt to keep the order of the final schedule.
13 On occasion I might take the liberty part way into
a given conversation to add a third person, another
participant or simply another member of the audience,
whom I know can add constructively to the conversation.
14 The entire meeting will be filmed as inconspicuously
as possible from the far left and right of the stage
and with one small camera in the audience.
15 At this moment there are no plans to live-stream
any of the conference. There will be an app with access
to a server to hold the conversations. It is planned that
this will be available on 1 December and will include a
running line of translation into several languages.
16 The app will also contain a large body of curated
personal information about you. Further explanation
about this will come to you next week.
17 I have personally worked out the breaks, lunches and
dinners and I believe they will be of the highest quality and in
rooms that will delight you, both at Esri and at The Mission Inn.
18 Obviously there is a lot of risk about the
conversations, particularly the quality, spontaneity,
clarity, improvisation and surprise.
19 The goal is to find some threads that have not
emerged before as you speak with your partner,
which will encapsulate a type of honesty and a non-
predicted path in response to each other.
20 This has happened in my several tests of this idea.
21 To repeat, I am endeavoring to make the filming,
ambiance, location and lack of press all focus on
your comfort and the quality of your experience.
This above all is my concern and my goal.
22 Improvised conversation in this manner is a new
form but a wonderful conversation is perhaps the
oldest human media for creative discourse. So in
that sense, this is a great leap backwards.
23 It will be a wonderful salon and an absolutely
immersive experience with extraordinary people.

MEMO TO PARTICIPANTS
re: FUTURE APP

I trust each of you has read my 24-point memo called
WWW Conference Conversation Guidelines with 24 points
that I believe give the spirit of the meeting itself. I've
had excellent response from many of you as well as
from sponsors and attendees. This memo addresses the
outcome of the conference, in other words, what I do with
the filming of these approximately 30 conversations.

1 It will be filmed in black and white by a team directed
by Jon Kamen and Sidney Beaumont of @radical.media,
and John Halloran of John Halloran Associates.
2 It will be unedited. There will be a camera on
each of the individuals in conversation, as well as a
long camera on the three of us sitting on stage.
3 Michael Smolens and David Orban of dotSUB will
then translate it into perhaps 10 languages and add a
running translation in English, which will address the
language needs of 90% plus of the world's population.
4 This will live on a server and be accessed by
an app that has a release date at this juncture of 1
December. The app will also contain a great deal of
additional information on each of the presenters.
5 The additional curated stuff—photos, videos,
and links is what this memo is focused on.
6 Scrollmotion has already done two extraordinary
versions of the organization and design of this app. They
have offices in San Diego and New York City.
7 There will be a series of unique videos on which I will
comment later, made where appropriate of you in situ.
8 The video of the entire conference of course can
be accessed by pairings of speakers from a list and
viewed as you would at the conference showing
individuals in improvised conversation. However, one
could also double click on a single name and go into
this visual biography of each of the participants.
9 The demo can be found at
http://vimeo.com/user7992663/review/47187545/29ddc526f0
The password is WWW. It shows an extremely brief version of
C. K. Williams, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, in which you
cannot only see a bio, for which we will ask a major expansion,
but also photographs of the covers of a few of his 11 books. We
would also like to have all of his books, which you will be able
to order form the app, some outtake videos, not from the
conference but from other sources that we would identify, and
that you will identify, as well as, in the case of C. K. Williams,
many pages, a few shown here, of his personally edited
writings of his poetry—something you can't find on YouTube,
a presentation or in a book, or perhaps anywhere but this app.
10 The idea of this app is to get a behind the scenes,
behind the curtain, personalized journey through
each individual, which will also have a list of links
to suggested articles, reviews, YouTubes and other
material that will fill out this visual biography.
11 This is an important point: if you Google Richard
Wurman, you come up with perhaps 450,000 citations.
The number changes daily. This would amount to 40,000+

pages, which of course nobody looks at. Basically it's junk
big data, and people mostly focus on one article and a
wikipedia entry. The attempt here is to have the first primitive
development of a platform for beginning to assuage some
curiosity in the beginning of looking at a visual biography of
at least these 50 people. If the platform works it's scalable.
That's the idea of a new modality. If it works for people
perhaps it will work for healthcare and other subjects.
12 I'm putting together a team of people consisting of Ali
Smolens, who will help curate some of the materials for
many of you, Paul Kandarian, a magazine writer friend
of mine from Rhode Island, and three others plus Blaise
Zerega, CEO of FORA.tv who has agreed to make some
original, simple videos such as Frank Gehry walking around
his office showing and discussing models of buildings that
he has not built, or variations of for instance the 8 Spruce
Street tower in New York or hopefully Craig Venter's
laboratories in a walk-through, E.O. Wilson's offices, etc. etc.
13 So this is a request for the following: please start thinking
about the stuff that you've never shown: everything from
baby pictures, pictures of your pets, pictures of your office,
pictures of your home, things that make you real. Multiple
photographs of yourself, perhaps a strip of photographs of
you taken in a photo booth at an amusement park that you
have in a drawer. Writings that you've done that show your
edits, something that shows you're real, human, and shows
your process. Pictures of your laboratories. Agree to have
somebody do a 5- or 10-minute walk through with you in your
office or your lab or your place of work or your architectural
studio. Videos or DVDs that for example I know Moshe
Safdie has which he makes to describe what a building will
look like in computer graphics to a client. I know he has a
fantastic one of an apartment house in Singapore. And I'm
sure Bjarke has similar things that he generally does not
release. Covers of books about you, covers of books by you. A
list of articles that you think critically describes you and links
to YouTubes or other videos or other citations that you think
and you have curated yourself that make you particularly
interesting, not the half a million available on line. Julie
Taymor most have lots of stuff as well as David Blaine.
14 We hope to have this put together, along with the
entire conference, for release by 1 December and promote
it immediately after Thanksgiving with the help of
IDG, Flipboard (Mike McCue), Esri, IIR and others. I
am going to ask for your cooperation out in Redlands at
the conference and I will have additional copies of this
and the other memo to give you when you register.
15 Attached are technical specifications for those of
you who understand them yourself. Otherwise please
show them to somebody in your office under the age of
30 who automatically understands them, who could help
us translate whatever you send us in a usable format. I
don't understand them myself but I'm sure some of you
have a better handle on this than I do. These will make
the process smooth and efficient and within budget.

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