We only had a couple of days between the documentary film crew leaving and our flights back to the UK. After a few of frantic days of travel we arrived in Vienna for a long weekend, and were collected at the airport by Bojana from the TEDxVienna team.
Our room at the Intercontinental Hotel was lovely, and we had chocolates and fruit waiting for us on our arrival. At the amazing VolksTheater that night we ran through plans for the next day, and each of the speakers got a couple of minutes on stage to practice and check through their slides.
The next morning we were collected at the hotel, and had time to look around and chat with a few of the volunteers. The day looked like it was going to be very well organised indeed.
Once the event started I waited a little nervously in the dressing room until I was due to talk. I was third on the bill, which would mean that once finished I’d be able to relax and enjoy the rest of the day.
With about 900 people attending the theatre was full to capacity, and I hoped I wasn’t going to forget any of my talk. It was by far the biggest group I have ever spoken in front of.
I think my planning and practices over the previous weeks helped greatly, and I managed to deliver the whole talk confidently, with only a couple of tiny hesitations while I tried to remember what came next. The 18 minutes seemed to fly by, and before I knew it I received a warm round of applause and headed off-stage.
Afterwards I took time to enjoy the other speakers as a member of the audience. They were all very professional and very interesting. Particular favourites were Auma Obama and Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
There should be videos from all speakers coming shortly, edited from five different camera views. I managed to see the livefeed video the day afterwards, and the talk seemed to go down very well. Unfortunately the feed video was only online for 24 hours or so, and has now disappeared.
I’ll post the edited video as soon as it is available, but in the meantime here are a couple of pix from the trip.
The whole day was amazingly well organised. Huge thanks to the TEDxVienna team and volunteers, to all the other speakers, and to the wonderfully enthusiastic audience. What a fantastic experience.
A couple of other blogs about the event:
http://andreaslindinger.at/2013/11/03/tedx-vienna-unlimited-how-far-can-you-go/
http://www.tedxvienna.at/blog/tedxvienna-unlimited-one-tweet-per-talk/
http://www.tedxvienna.at/blog/tedxvienna-unlimited-thank-you/#more-13710