TED Stewardship, an Opportunity for Peeragogy?

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Jun 21, 2025, 3:56:26 PMJun 21
to peeragogy...@lists.peeragogy.org, peeragogy, Peeragogy Project
Hiya, Peeragogues!

I assume y'all are familiar with TED Talks, those popular, often inspirational, innovative videos. You may have seen that the head of TED, Chris, posted this on their blog


"So today, with the support of dear friends and colleagues, I am issuing an open invitation to anyone who believes they might have the resources and the ideas to oversee TED for its next 25 years (and beyond!) to step forward." 

Joe and I thought this is may be a great opportunity for Peeragogy!

We've drafted the letter below. Does anyone else want to be a signatory when we send it?

Dear Chris,


We are members of the Peeragogy Project, and we have a frankly out-there proposal for you: let us use peer production and learning techniques to guide TED into its next phase of non-hierarchical, participatory, global leadership. We use the word peeragogy to talk about peer-led multi-way collaboration in relatively non-hierarchical settings. Examples are found in education, business, government, art collective, volunteer, and NGO settings. Peeragogy involves both problem solving and problem definition, and results in learning. Participants in a peeragogical endeavor collaboratively build emergent structures that are responsive to their changing context, and that, in turn, change that context. 


We do not just mean us co-leading by us in the Project. We mean to treat TED itself as a member cooperative. We’re suggesting a big idea for which no red carpet is big enough. This is about building the future of technology, education, and design through direct democracy. Everyone within the TED community gets a vote. The goal will be a flatter organizational structure suitable to adapt to the demands of the next quarter century. No doubt this will be super challenging, and we haven’t got a detailed plan. What we have is a set of design patterns for building effective learning communities.


Howard Rheingold, TED alum speaking on “The new power of collaboration”, convened the worldwide Peeragogy project in 2012 to develop techniques for any group of people to learn any topic. We have refined them over the last fourteen years. We are confident that we can figure out how to do this together with you and the other brilliant minds of TED.


Sincerely,

Peeragogy Project


If you'd like to make changes, feel free to do so on the Google Doc! =]


Yours in Peeragogy,
Charlie

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