DO Lectures
We wanted to show there was another way. So, The DO Lectures was born. The idea was a simple one. We wanted to gather together the world’s leading DOers, disruptors and changemakers, have them share their hearts and stories, and encourage others to DO amazing things too.
That was over fourteen years ago. Since then we’ve welcomed more than 300 speakers to DO Wales, our annual lecture events in Wales, the USA and Australia. And we’ve held courses and workshops with over 3,000 people. Simple ideas are often the best.
We are home to the creative underdog. An encouragement network for those seeking a different path. So don’t just sit there, DO something.
How do we make it
Special?
We’ve been working with the DO Lectures in one way or another since 2013. The greatest challenge has always been communicating what the experience of the event is really like. It is an inherently impossible goal, but we like to think we come pretty close.
Our DO Journey
In 2013, long-time collaborator, Barret Bowman, and I began our DO Lectures Journey. We spent three years working with the DO USA, shooting and editing the talks, making trailers, making anthem videos and making social content.
In 2017 after the DO Lectures USA took a pause, we began a conversation with DO founder, David Heiatt, about what it could look like to host a live-stream program of the entire weekend at their flagship event in Cardigan, Wales.
The two biggest questions were…
Could we really pull off a Live-Edit/Live Stream of a full weekend from an old dairy farm at the edge of Wales? If so, how do we make it special?
We did manage to pull it off and it continued to evolve for three years until covid hit. Each year we learned, each year we had a little more fun, and each year we were more accessible, more creative with our reach, and had more people tuning in.
We built out a live-edit rig on a camera cart. We would plug the existing cameras for the talks, into our switcher and live-edit the talks while streaming. Then after a block of talks, we would unplug and bounce the cart over to the field or the gin bar or the old sheep barn, and do live interviews with speakers. Barret also had blocks of taking the audience around the event in the in-between spaces for little adventures.
The third year, we partnered with London based platform, Push-Live, to broaden our potential for people to access, creating a platform where anyone could push the stream to their own personal social accounts for anyone to tune in.
After 2 years down for covid, the event had to rebuild and the live stream was not a possible expense that they could add. In 2022 Barret and I returned to Wales as part of the Compare team, introducing speakers, and in 2024, I gave my first DO Lecture.
