Videos & Recap: Ignite Seattle #35

Thanks to all of you who joined us last night for another sold-out show at the Egyptian Theater. Once again Seattle’s most supportive, energetic, and playful crowd encouraged a line-up some of our city’s most creative and interesting citizens.

All of the videos from last night are now live (thanks to Bootstrapper studios)! You can watch individual talks or the entire show in one video.  Please take a minute to share your favorites on all the interwebs.

  1. Get Free Accommodations Worldwide, Thanks to Neurotic Dogs, Silvana Clark
  2. Running A Hummingbird Food Bank, Lauryl Zenobi
  3. What Government Bureaucracy Taught Me About Creativity, Joel Fariss
  4. Bias Proofing Business Broom Closets and Board Rooms, Sara Sanford
  5. Swinging On The Lamp Posts Designing For Play In The Modern City, Colin MacDonald
  6. Qualifying Your WA Initiative For Under $500,000, Gabe Meyer
  7. How One Guy Can Make You Less Racist, Maryam Hosseini
  8. What I Learned Visiting Every Park In Seattle, Linnea Westerlind
  9. How To Mouse With Your Toes- Throw Your Mouse On The Floor, Not Out The Window, Elizabeth Nelson
  10. How To Not Be The Least Secure Gazelle, Zachary Cohn
  11. My Life As A Superhero Myths About Disaster Response, Chris Sheach
  12. Not Your Father’s Lumberjacks, Seth Zuckerman
  13. I Love Profanity! The Surprisingly Difficult Decision To Remove One Word From My Book, Jeremy Kayes

There was a ton of great photos taken: here and here and don’t forget the photo booth photos here (tag yourself & friends)

And if you were there live, or have a been to an Ignite in the last two years, take a minute to tell us what you thought. We want to make each Ignite better than the last and our 3 minute survey is just a click away. Thanks!

How to get standby tickets

If we are sold out again for an Ignite Seattle event, do not fear. We have a standby ticket system, thanks to the folks at Town Hall Seattle. Here’s how it works:

  1. Note: we can’t 100% promise there will be tickets – it depends on no-shows and other factors we don’t control. 
  2. But there probably will be some! We often have 10 or more available, but we can’t promise exactly how many.
  3. At 6:00pm a line will be set up outside the Egyptian theater (our venue). Doors open at 6:30pm for ticket holders, show starts at 7:30pm.
  4. You show up and get in line. Tickets will be given away first come, first served, one per person and you can’t buy for folks not in line with you.
  5. At 7:15pm venue staff will make the call and release tickets in batches.

If you want to be notified when tickets go on sale for the next Ignite (so you can avoid waiting in the standby line), hop on our mailing list.  Thanks and have a nice day or two.

Speaker List: Ignite Seattle #35 at The Egyptian on March 1st

Selecting just 14 talks from the list of speaker submissions was tough, with so many great ideas! But here is the list of who’s speaking at Ignite Seattle #35 on March 1st (with the speaking order yet to be determined):

Hint: you should buy your tickets for Ignite #35 now!

  • Get Free Accommodations Worldwide, Thanks to Neurotic Dogs – Silvana Clark
  • How One Guy Can Make You Less Racist – Maryam Hosseini
  • What I Learned Visiting Every Park In Seattle – Linnea Westerlind
  • My Life As A Superhero: Myths About Disaster Response – Chris Sheach
  • What Adults Can Learn From Teens – Sargun Handa
  • What Government Bureaucracy Taught Me About Creativity – Joel Fariss
  • Bias-Proofing Business: Broom Closets and Board Rooms – Sara Sanford
  • How To Not Be The Least Secure Gazelle – Zachary Cohn
  • Running A Hummingbird Food Bank – Lauryl Zenobi
  • Qualifying Your WA Initiative For Under $500,000 – Gabe Meyer
  • I Love Profanity! The Surprisingly Difficult Decision To Remove One Word From My Book – Jeremy Kayes
  • Swinging On The Lamp Posts: Designing For Play In The Modern City – Colin MacDonald
  • How To Mouse With Your Toes: Throw Your Mouse On The Floor, Not Out The Window – Elizabeth Nelson
  • Not Your Father’s Lumberjacks – Seth Zuckerman

We can’t wait to see you at The Egyptian on March 1st!
Reminder: you should buy your tickets for Ignite #35 now, if you don’t want to miss out.

How To Promote Your Ignite Talk

If you’re speaking at the next Ignite Seattle, make the most of your amazing opportunity! Here’s how:

Before the event:

  1. Invite your friends and family to be in the audience. We’d love to have them in the audience to support you. Tickets are inexpensive and it’s a great night. You can use this video to help explain what Ignite Seattle is like.
  2. On Facebook, go to our event page for Ignite Seattle #39, mark yourself as “going” and then share it out to your network. You can directly invite people to attend and you should!
  3. If you are on Twitter, Facebook or have your own blog, here’s a simple announcement you can copy and paste

Big news: my talk on “<Insert your amazing talk title here>” will be part of the next Ignite Seattle event on Thursday June 6th at Town Hall Seattle. It’s an evening of great short talks on interesting topics and you should come to cheer me on!

You can buy tickets now, and act fast as they usually sell out. Hope to see you there.

After the event:

We capture and publish videos of all talks and post them online in just a few days. We want to help you to get your message out as best we can.

  1. You’ll receive an email a few days after the event with links to all of the talks, including yours.
  2. Find your video and post it everywhere, Facebook, Twitter, your blog, your neighborhood newsletter – your friends and family want to see it.
  3. We will also post photos from our staff photographers that you can share with your friends and social networks.

Also See:

Ticket Update: Ignite #35 (March 1st)

For the first time since we started charging admission, we are raising our ticket price for Ignite Seattle.

Some hard financial realities drove this decision. When Town Hall closed for its renovation, we had to move to a smaller venue. The Egyptian Theater is fantastic, but it only seats 570 folks. Town Hall could seat 830. That leaves us down about $1,300 in revenue right off the bat.

We are an all-volunteer organization, and we run a tight financial ship, so our costs aren’t too high. Every penny that we collect goes into the program.

As evaluated our new situation, for the first time in our history, we were looking at a non-sustainable budget. As diligent stewards of this community resource, we made the decision to raise prices.

So, beginning with our March 1 event, the price of admission will be $10 ($5 for Town Hall members).

We’re working hard to make sure that Ignite will still be a good value for you. And we’re working all the time to make the event even better.

Most importantly, we still get as many high-quality community speaking submissions as ever. So you can count on another great line-up March 1.

At $10 we are still more affordable than a first-run movie. And, honestly, when was the last time you felt that fun, friendly community vibe in a Regal Cinemas lobby?

We hope you’ll support us in this decision. Which you can do right now by buying a ticket for Ignite Seattle #35 🙂

Be An Ignite Speaker (ideas due Jan 19)

Great event… Ignite. Check!
Great MC… Scott Berkun. Check!
Great venue… The Egyptian Theatre. Check!
Great speakers… well that is where you come in 🙂

We want you to share a story about a great (or weird) idea you love, a hard lesson learned, an insight into how something in the world works (or should work), or anything you are passionate about and want to share.

The talk submission deadline is Friday, January 19 at midnight.

Don’t worry if you’re an inexperienced speaker — we provide two speaker training sessions to help you craft your story and feel more confident about speaking in front of a crowd.

We want to hear from you! So submit a talk idea and enlighten us — but make it quick!

Help Wanted: Our Team Needs You

Here at Ignite Seattle, our city’s largest open platform for citizens to share their stories, a small team of volunteer organizers makes our sold-out shows happen. Thanks to you, our fans, our events have become so popular now that we’re looking to grow our team.

If you’re not familiar with what our events are like, this short video explains it well.

We are growing our team and now have several roles we’re recruiting for:

1. Role: Event Producer for Ignite Seattle

The event producer for Ignite Seattle is the master of the back of the house at our events. They coordinate with our MC, volunteer wrangler and other organizers to plan each show, and then work directly with our venue to ensure everything goes smoothly. During the evening they are the primary showrunner (with help as needed from the MC and other organizers), to make sure people, equipment and fun are in the right place at the right time. They need to excel at planning, communication and real-time project management, and also have a love for live cultural and civic events.

As part of the organizing team, the producer may collaborate with the team (using Slack) between events to find speakers, improve our relationships with other organizations and help improve the quality and thoughtfulness of all our creations (website, videos and other media).

We do three events a year and all of our events are in the evening (usually Thursday night).

2. Role: Design-Master (Web and visual design)

As one of the premier live events in Seattle we need a web and digital presence that captures the fun, challenging and community building energy of our shows. As design master you’d lead the way in designing and building a web experience that enables visitors to easily find interesting talks from our past events and that helps sell tickets for upcoming ones. You’d also refine our brand and visual style, improve or create designs for our logos, t-shirts, slides and other digital and print materials. You’d get high-autonomy, clear goals, a fun team to work with, and a way to use your significant talents for good.

3. Role: Money-Master (Bookkeeper)

We excel at making the most out of our events, working mostly with volunteers to make everything happen. Yet we do have basic accounting tasks, including paying bills, collecting ticket revenue (from our venue partners) covering expenses, and doing non-profit accounting and planning, things most of us have only minor experience with.

We need an experienced bookkeeper to track our income and expenses, help us make sure we pay our vendors on time, and improve our financial planning and basic accounting.

4. Role: Sponsor-Master

For  years we’ve filled Town Hall Seattle, and now, The Egyptian theater, with sold out shows that provide a great platform for the amazing stories, projects and ideas Seattle citizens are working on.

We want to extend that platform to include a handful of select sponsors, trading resources we can use to improve our shows, for premier exposure to our audience and community.

The role would be to define our sponsorship program, recruit sponsors and manage ongoing relationships with them.

Minimum time commitment: a couple of hours a week between events, with spikes of 5-10 hours a week leading up to and during the events (3 times a year).

Rewards:  You’ll be part of a fun, smart and loyal team of volunteer organizers, well connected in the Seattle tech and arts community. You will meet many interesting and amazing people, work with a great team, and share in thrills at each live event. You’ll get to use skills you already have to do good in the arts community in Seattle. Ignite Seattle will likely be one of the most rewarding things you contribute to regularly.

How we work: We are mostly virtual (Slack), with monthly in-person meetings, and more as needed or when we get closer to the next event. We are all volunteers and happily wear many hats. You may get your hands dirty often, and have fun doing it, as we are a small, lean team.

How To Apply: 

  1. Give us a brief rundown on your past experience (link to resume or LinkedIn is fine)
  2. Tell us what you love about Ignite Seattle, and/or why you want to join the team?
  3. Email the above to pr@scottberkun.com

Prepare: how to find royalty free images

If you present at Ignite Seattle, your talk, and your slides, will be seen by hundreds of people, and even more online. It’s important that you use only images that you have permission to use: you wouldn’t want someone to use your work with out permission, would you?

To help, there are several ways to find images that are rights and royalty free, the easiest is Google.

Your own images

If you have images you have taken yourself that do not include intellectual property owned by others, you can of course use your own photos.

Google Images

  1. Go to Google Images Search
  2. Search for something (e.g. “people playing dodge ball”)
  3. Click on the Tools option, on the right
    rights-free-1
  4. Click on Usage rights

rights-free-2

  1. Select Labeled for reuse or the level of license you need

rights-free-3

You can also set other options for the images you want (high size equals higher quality).

Other sources of royalty-free images

Ignite Seattle #34 – The Recap

Thank you to all of you who joined us last week for a spectacular SOLD OUT show at The Egyptian Theatre. We learned about the unusual history of volunteering, robots taking our jobs, death, sofas, pageants, birders, Seattle and so much more. Which talk was your favorite? Let us know in the comments.

Our sincerest hope is you had a great time and will spread the ideas of our speakers to your friends, coworkers and followers. And we hope you will join us for our next event. Mark your calendars: Ignite Seattle #35 is Thursday March 1st, 2018.

Watch videos from your favorite talks right now:

Don’t stop there – here’s more you can do:

Speaker NameSpeaker NameSpeaker Name

Speaker List: Ignite Seattle #34 at The Egyptian on Oct 19th

Well, Seattle, you did it again. You made the Ignite Seattle organizers job of selecting 16 talks very difficult. There were 66 talk submissions and any 16 would have made for a great Ignite.  Thanks again to everyone who submitted a talk or encouraged others to do so.

Here is most of the speaker list. As always, order is to be determined.

  • Dead 2.0 – Jeremy Dragt
  • From Tech to Texas – Jack Timmons
  • Sofas Are (not) Scary – Rebecca West
  • Embracing Obstacles As Opportunities – Alicia Crank
  • The Unusual History of Volunteering – Amy Faulkner
  • Leading the Majority Minority – Eugene Hsu
  • If You Want to Create Change, Host a Pageant! – Abari Charles
  • 4 Signs Your Friend or Loved One Is a Birder – Jeremy Schwartz
  • How to Make Seattle Your Own in 10 Easy Steps – Monica Guzman
  • How to Stay Calm Around Impossibly Annoying People – Susan Fee
  • Disruptive Play: The Trickster in Politics and Culture – Shepherd Siegel
  • Doorstops & Bicycles: Why We Humans Keep Making Things – Jeremy Bowen
  • Sleeping with Specters — How Designing the Dead Changed My Life – Patrick Blanchard
  • Robots are Not Coming for Your Job and We’re All Going to be Okay – Patrick Rauland
  • The Proximity Principle (and why you’ll probably become best friends with the person sitting next to you) – Rupi Sureshkumar

We will keep you posted when more talks are confirmed.

Pro Tip: Buy your tickets now we think this one will sell out!