If you read my blog you’ll know that I’m a fan of short presentation formats like Pecha Kucha (20 slides x 20 seconds) and Ignite (20 slides x 15 seconds), and I have no fundamental objection to the longer, eighteen minute free-form TED format.

But there’s something about TED that I don’t like.

TED is elitist.

It is marketed as such: “The annual TED conferences, in Long Beach/Palm Springs and Edinburgh, bring together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers”. Attendees are hand-picked. Attending TED is very expensive: currently $7,500 per year for TED Conference and $6,000 per year for TEDGlobal. Much is made of the elite audience in attendance. Presenters are expected to spend significant time creating a highly scripted presentation that touches the audience profoundly, ideally in some novel way.

There’s a page on TED’s website that attempts to address these issues. It defends the exorbitant cost of attending TED live events by claiming that the majority of people who attend are very successful and their success has enabled them to pay these fees. TED is owned by the private nonprofit Sapling Foundation. The foundation’s most recent (2009) 990 tax return states that the foundation had assets of $23 million, revenues of $20 million, and paid its top five employees over $1 million in compensation. TED states that some people are given scholarships to attend, but the 990 shows no details on the level of financial support provided and the website is silent as to the method of selecting scholarship recipients.

I believe that the majority of people have something worthwhile to say about some topic, and what they have to say is of interest to their peers. The Pecha Kucha events I’ve run have been filled with presenters who responded to an open request, and the resulting sessions have been interesting, entertaining, and fulfilling to their audiences. TED perpetuates the myth that only a minority in this world have something worth saying. The organization derives revenue from appointing itself as gatekeeper of who should be up on the stage and creating an exclusive event that can be capitalized. TED is welcome to take this approach, of course, and entitled to its success.

But we should not be led to believe that the presenters of TED are the only people who should be presenting in this way. Such a belief perpetuates the old hierarchical model of learning: a minority of people who know and a majority that don’t. The reality of the importance of social learning in today’s world, learning where a teacher at one moment becomes a student the next, is weakened by a organization that succeeds in the marketplace by selecting and glorifying a few to the exclusion of the rest of us.

As I write this, I’m about to return from a two week vacation on Anguilla, a tiny rural British West Indies island with some of the most beautiful beaches in the world (you may hate me now). My home is a tiny rural town in Vermont, but although the population of the surrounding area is similar to that of Anguilla’s there’s a interesting difference between my home and island destinations—and I’m not talking about the weather.

At home, there’s no way to know whether someone has a connection to the area. The occupant of a car I see driving on Route 9 near my house might be a businesswoman from upstate New York traveling through Vermont to Maine—or someone who’s been living a mile further down my road for three years who I haven’t yet met.

But in Anguilla, anyone I see has something in common: we are, even temporary visitors like me, residents of an island fifteen miles long and three miles wide. Our individual life stories, no matter how different, all include that we are, at this moment, living on one small island with a unique history and culture. Some of the people I met: the woman who, five years ago, came to work here for a week and decided to stay, the barbecue guy telling us about the tiny mosquitoes that appear at night when there’s no wind, the Danish tourist who collects shells on the beach so the hermit crabs can find new homes—we all have Anguilla to start from, and this gives us a way to connect.

A good conference provides the same opportunities to its attendees. While we are together, we share; not just the conference location, but also the commonality that each of us chose to attend and all this implies, as well as our experiences together. Creating a conference environment where it’s easy for us to share these things makes the event richer, interesting, and memorable. Perhaps, even, as enjoyable as an island vacation…