Transcriber: Duke Zhai Reviewer: Denise RQ
Greg Dorsainville: Morning, everyone.
(Audience) Good morning.
So, I'll start.
Our story starts out about two years ago
when our team were sitting in a classroom with Internet theorist Clay Shirky,
and Clay started to show us pictures that looked like this.
What these dots represent are people interacting,
sharing, talking to another.
And he pointed out that when you increase the number of people in that interaction
the conversation gets complicated, hard to manage.
So, he told us to go and look at other websites
where we all gathered in large groups to discuss and talk online
and what we saw was that these sites
were designed in a way that encouraged specific interactions.
Sometimes they want you to post faster.
Other times they want you to post less.
And a lot of these decisions lead to increase revenues for the sites owners.
So, the idea was,
now that we were sensitive to these design decisions,
Clay challenged us to create our own conversational space.
So we started with what we knew
and we noticed that there's two ideas that were encouraged on these sites,
like Twitter and Facebook.
They want us to broadcast freely, no filter,
and they want us to connect with people we know.
So, when we are thinking about this new space
we thought, let's break these ideas,
let's think of a space
where only one person gets to broadcast freely
and that person is a stranger.
And that is the idea behind the Listserve.
So let me tell you what the Listserve is.
The Listserve is what we are calling an e-mail lottery
and what that means is every day one person is chosen at random
to send a message to everyone else who is on the list.
Take a minute to think about that.
Sometimes, the message doesn't work, it doesn't resonate.
Other times, it surprises even the most jaded among us.
But every day, you find yourself wondering
why did this person choose this moment, choose this opportunity to share with us?
Why share this?
So, every day, the Listserve is an experiment.
So, I'm going to do something a little bit unorthodox,
and this is something we've been talking about for a long time.
Today we are going to do a Listserve in the auditorium.
This is going to be the TEDxListserve.
I'm going to throw this ball into the audience
and whoever catches it it's going to have the opportunity
to come on stage after we've done talking and share or do something with us.
Now, here it comes.
Great catch.
I really encourage you to pick it up.
It's going to be great.
(Laughter)
I see you.
(Applause)
Come on up.
Our teammates over here will help you.
And you'll get to prep to have your conversation later on.
No, come on up. Great.
Trust us, it will be great.
And they'll prep you, they're pros.
So, let's go back to our experiment.
Let's put some ideas into your mind.
And with every good experiment it starts all with a good question.
Now, if you had the chance to speak to one million people, what would you say?
I'll let that seat in your mind a little bit
because it's a hard thing to ask.
What we thought was that if you had that opportunity
you would say something pretty damn interesting,
or do something very important to you.
So, the reason that we thought this is we all know what it's like
to be on sites like Youtube
where there's conversation among strangers.
It's a mess. It's tough.
And that's because all sites are designed to let you hide in the crowd,
like that person who tried to get away from their opportunity.
(Laughter)
And if you don't want to hide,
if you want to be as light as possible,
you have to shout loud and be profane, experts are always drowned out.
But we thought if we designed an interaction
where one person's voice was loudest,
where we put down the volume of everyone else's voices but one,
we would increase the value of that person's voice.
Possibly your voice.
So, these ideas where difficult to manage
but we were thinking about:
now need to build something in order to achieve this space.
Alvin Chang: So, now that we've done all the thinking, we've to make it happen.
We took a step back, and we took inventory.
We tried to figure out what we had in place
and all we had was this: we had the five of us on the List.
So, no big deal, all we needed was...
(Laughter)
no big deal, right?
We were talked down because that's a hard number.
So we got to 10,000,
and we had said that we wouldn't launch this
until we hit 10,000 people.
But the problem is 10,000 is a really big number
when you don't have any content to sell whatsoever.
We didn't know who the first winner would be,
we didn't know what they would write.
So we started to figure out how to sell our idea.
We went out to streets in New York and we asked people
what would you say to a million people?
And we made a little video montage out of it.
We reached out to media and we said: "Hey, we're doing this online experiment."
I'm a member of the media so I know if you use the word experiment
our ears perk up and we are like, "Oh, yeah, we'll write about it."
And so, they wrote about it.
And then we started to shape our language.
We said: This is an e-mail lottery.
We will not sell your e-mail address to anybody.
And then we started to put all the stuff onto a website.
And, we launched sign up.
And something really awesome started to happen.
Within the first few hours, we had a few hundred people sign up,
mostly our friends and family
but, hey, it's a few hundred, right?
(Laughter)
And then we started, in the first few days we got a few thousand people signing up.
People we didn't even know.
(Laughter)
I know, right?
(Laughter)
And then, within the first week, we hit 10,000.
We hit 10,000 and we launched.
It's been two years
and the experiment has been ongoing.
And like every experiment you want to know, "Well, what are the results?"
Well, let me tell you.
In the first e-mail, this guy said:
"Enjoy the little things in life because you're not special."
(Laughter)
He was a Swedish guy.
Not that that has anything to do with it.
The second e-mail was a short poem
and the third e-mail
(Laughter)
she raved about the Diva Cup.
I didn't know what it was.
And then something really interesting started to happen,
people started to interact with the audience
and the audience started to interact back with them.
This woman invited everyone on the list to a picnic, a real picnic,
and a hundred strangers showed up and enjoyed an afternoon together.
This guy offered to write a personalized note
to every single person who wrote him back
and this is what he wrote back to me.
And this gentleman,
wrote about the troubles he and his wife had getting pregnant
and he was looking for someone to connect to, someone to relate to.
And people started to get inspired by the Listserve
and experiment with the Listserve.
One person who didn't even win the Listserve took all the e-mails
and made blackout poems out of them.
Another former winner was so inspired by this experience
made his own e-mail newsletter.
It just hit 2,000 members. It's called 'Today in Tabs'.
You guys should sign up.
And another winner solicited audio stories of memories
and made an art project out of them.
It's called "This is a memory of."
There you go.
Whoops. You've already seen that one.
So, the Listserve has taught us
that we don't really know what we want from the Internet.
A lot of times we get a piece of content, and we say I wish it was funnier,
I wish it was shorter, I wish it was a life advice.
But like a lot of the Internet,
the best parts of the Listserve are when we stop treating stuff as content
and start treating it as people reaching out to us
and wanting to have a genuine conversation.
One of the questions we got most often when we first launched
from all the media outlets that contacted us
was why are you using e-mail?
And we said something like
e-mail is a really intimate place, it's your internet home.
What I wish we said was this.
We've gotten into this habit of having private conversations in public.
This is sending condolences in a tweet
or saying Happy Birthday on Facebook.
This means a lot of times
our conversations are more about performance
than they are about communicating.
It's not entirely a bad thing
but a lot of quiet conversations are kind of drowned out or never had.
The Listserve starts from this ultimate performance
and the follow up from that is
hundreds if not thousands of quiet, private, non broadcast conversations.
And from those people we hear of penpals
and partnerships, and friendships being born.
In fact, I was just talking to somebody backstage
who got some job career advice from someone who won the Listserve,
and it's from those people
who we've learned to start asking the question
what would you say back to that one person?
Away from the question what would you say to a million people?
You never hear about that, what would you say back to one person?
because it's not broadcast, no one writes about it, no one contacts us about it,
but it's quiet and they're important.
And when we start hearing whispers of that that's when we get excited,
and that's what makes what we've made entirely worth it.
So, I'm going to get off the stage now
and you guys are going to be really awesome to our winner.
Let's see where he is.
(Applause)
Alright, so he has give or take a minute.
Actually, I'm from Turkey, so English isn't my mother language,
and I'm bad at speaking English.
(Applause)
Thank you.
Actually, I was sleeping.
(Laughter)
I couldn't understand everything you said. I'm sorry.
I don't know. He threw ball like...
I think it has magic.
I'm from Turkey, Istanbul.
We are lots of people from Turkey.
(Applause)
We are studying Bogaziçi University
and we are learning English in DC, Mentora College.
I don't know what can I say, but... it has real magic.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Good job. Fantastic.
Thank you everyone, thank you.
(Applause)