TED Conversations

Just in time for the next season of thought-provoking talks, TED launched a new discussion forum intended to spark conversation around their series of videos. TED Conversations allows people to contribute ideas and questions to the community, attaching them to specific talks.

The new social media craze is Q&A. Quora, launched in 2009 and opened to the public last summer, is collection of questions and answers created and managed by its community. It joined a field that already included Yahoo Answers and Answers.com. Although TED Questions isn’t quite the same structure, it will overlap the knowledge management domain by trying to become an online authority for specific topics.

My impression of Quora is poor, partly because of the expectations I had going in to my first use. According to a report from Experian Hitwise, the people who have flocked to the site are college-educated or ready-to-graduate young professionals. While any early community is going to be dominated by a particular demographic as it grows, Quora gives off a needy job search kind of vibe. My rejection of the service, though, comes from not allowing its use to grow organically. Rather than being an open community of Q&A, Quora is heavily moderated to accept only certain kinds of questions (e.g., no survey inquiries).

Presumably, TED Questions is also curated from above—much like the TED and TEDx events themselves—by virtue of the video archives that will be catalysts for discussion. It remains to be seen if, like Quora, the site will remove posts over wording. Conversations will take three forms (Questions, Ideas, and Debates) and have the option to be tied to up to 10 video talks. The posts will also include an important setting. As TED describes its service:

We believe that conversations, like talks, benefit from time constraints. So just as TEDTalks are limited to 18 minutes or less, TED Conversations are set to last one day, one week or one month. When you start a conversation, you also decide when it will end; afterward, you can summarize the discussion with a closing statement.

This is key. Ad-hoc communities who come together knowing when they will disperse are more likely to be meaningfully engaged while they are together. This was definitely true for Web Lab’s Small Group Dialogue forums a decade ago.

Since each discussion includes participation by the thought leaders who have taken the stage, there is a level of expertise around each topic that is enticing. That can be a double-edged sword. As with Quora’s high-profile question-askers, access to someone like game designer Jane McGonigal is a big draw to get participants involved. If the resulting conversation evolves into an online press conference—with people deferring to the expert—it becomes less valuable as a discussion forum than as a supplement to the video talks.

The timing of this works out well for our local TED initiative. Bloomington will host a series of TEDx talks on May 14, 2011 around the theme of “Wisdom of Play.” (Apply to attend the main event at Buskirk-Chumley.) The lineup features a mix of locals and national speakers, many with ties to Bloomington and Indiana University. We will also be running events around the mainstage conversation, including some simulcast sites that Saturday and an unconference activity—”Playing With Wisdom”—on Sunday, to process the content in the previous day’s talks. With TED Questions, there is a potential to better connect our event with the rest of the TED community and give people a destination for continuing conversation.