NEDx: Naked Extemporaneous Discussion

Last month I combined two of my favorite things: extemporaneous discussion and nudity. I was shocked at how many people RSVP’d (nearly 45), then pleasantly surprised when only 14 showed up. Cold feet, maybe?

The event was designed as both a contest (cash prizes woo!) and a workshop. This is how it worked:

* Starting clothed, we held an opening circle to introduce ourselves and say a few words about what we were feeling in that moment

* I asked the audience what does it mean for someone to be a good speaker? And a bad speaker? and wrote the answers on a big white board

* Breaking off into groups of 5, I had each group pull a few cards from the hilariously irreverent and seriously confronting question deck AskHole

* Each person took two minutes to respond to one of the questions

* Each person anonymously ranked the others from most to least resonant (according to the attributes on the board or just vibe), and turned their votes in to me.

* I had a clown come out and do an act (to distract people while I entered their scores).

* I tallied up the scores and did my best to recombine people into groups with even distribution of high/medium/low scores.

* We did four rounds in ninety minutes. It took me about ten minutes to count the votes and recombine people between rounds.

* I invited the 3 highest scoring people up to answer a final question: What are you passionate about, and what measurable action can the people in this room take to help you with that?

* Veela won!

I was happy with the event and hope to make it a regular thing as long as people continue to be interested in it.

For future events:

I could imagine redistributing people in more of a hierarchical way. This would require weighing the high scorers so the last place person in the highest ranked group is not given the same number of points as the last ranked person in the lower groups. But for now this method seemed to work.

In retrospect, the clown was fun but a better use of time would have been to give participants time to give feedback to each other.

I could have prolonged the transition period from clothed to nude. And I could have used less intense question decks in earlier rounds.

Curious? Join us for another NEDx tomorrow February 6th in Brooklyn at 7pm. Register here

We have a men only NEDx coming up (date TBD), to learn about that sign up for my newsletter here.

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