what it is we put our speakers through:

sweaty palms, sleepless nights,

a wholly unnatural fear of clocks.

I mean, it's quite brutal.

And I'm also a little nervous about this.

There are nine billion humans coming our way.

Now, the most optimistic dreams

can get dented by the prospect

of people plundering the planet.

But recently, I've become intrigued

by a different way of thinking of large human crowds,

because there are circumstances

where they can do something really cool.

It's a phenomenon that I think

any organization or individual can tap into.

It certainly impacted the way we think about TED's future,

and perhaps the world's future overall.

So, let's explore.

The story starts with just a single person,

a child, behaving a little strangely.

This kid is known online as Lil Demon.

He's doing tricks here, dance tricks,

that probably no six-year-old in history ever managed before.

How did he learn them?

And what drove him to spend the hundreds of hours of practice

this must have taken?

Here's a clue.

(Video) Lil Demon: ♫ Step your game up. Oh. Oh. ♫

♫ Step your game up. Oh. Oh. ♫

Chris Anderson: So, that was sent to me by this man,

a filmmaker, Jonathan Chu,

who told me that was the moment he realized

the Internet was causing dance to evolve.

This is what he said at TED in February.

In essence,

dancers were challenging each other online to get better;

incredible new dance skills were being invented;

even the six-year-olds were joining in.

It felt like a revolution.

And so Jon had a brilliant idea:

He went out to recruit the best of the best dancers

off of YouTube

to create this dance troupe --

The League of Extraordinary Dancers, the LXD.

I mean, these kids were web-taught,

but they were so good that they got to play at the Oscars this year.

And at TED here in February,

their passion and brilliance just took our breath away.

So, this story

of the evolution of dance

seems strangely familiar.

You know, a while after TEDTalks started taking off,

we noticed that speakers

were starting to spend a lot more time in preparation.

It was resulting in incredible new talks like these two.

... Months of preparation

crammed into 18 minutes,

raising the bar cruelly for the next generation of speakers,

with the effects that we've seen this week.

It's not as if J.J. and Jill

actually ended their talks saying, "Step your game up,"

but they might as well have.

So, in both of these cases,

you've got these cycles of improvement,

apparently driven

by people watching web video.

What is going on here?

Well, I think it's the latest iteration of a phenomenon we can call

"crowd-accelerated innovation."

And there are just three things you need for this thing to kick into gear.

You can think of them

as three dials on a giant wheel.

You turn up the dials, the wheel starts to turn.

And the first thing you need is ... a crowd,

a group of people who share a common interest.

The bigger the crowd,

the more potential innovators there are.

That's important, but actually most people in the crowd

occupy these other roles.

They're creating the ecosystem

from which innovation emerges.

The second thing you need is light.

You need clear, open visibility

of what the best people in that crowd are capable of,

because that is how you will learn

how you will be empowered to participate.

And third, you need desire.

You know, innovation's hard work.

It's based on hundreds of hours of research, of practice.

Absent desire, not going to happen.

Now, here's an example -- pre-Internet --

of this machine in action.

Dancers at a street corner --

it's a crowd, a small one,

but they can all obviously see what each other can do.

And the desire part comes, I guess,

from social status, right?

Best dancer walks tall, gets the best date.

There's probably going to be some innovation happening here.

But on the web,

all three dials are ratcheted right up.

The dance community is now global.

There's millions connected.

And amazingly,

you can still see what the best can do,

because the crowd itself shines a light on them,

either directly, through comments, ratings,

email, Facebook, Twitter,

or indirectly,

through numbers of views,

through links that point Google there.

So, it's easy to find the good stuff,

and when you've found it, you can watch it in close-up repeatedly

and read what hundreds of people have written about it.

That's a lot of light.

But the desire element

is really dialed way up.

I mean, you might just be a kid with a webcam,

but if you can do something that goes viral,

you get to be seen by the equivalent

of sports stadiums crammed with people.

You get hundreds of strangers writing excitedly about you.

And even if it's not that eloquent -- and it's not --

it can still really make your day.

So, this possibility

of a new type of global recognition,

I think, is driving huge amounts of effort.

And it's important to note that it's not just the stars who are benefiting:

because you can see the best, everyone can learn.

Also, the system is self-fueling.

It's the crowd that shines the light and fuels the desire,

but the light and desire are a lethal one-two combination

that attract new people to the crowd.

So, this is a model

that pretty much any organization could use

to try and nurture its own cycle

of crowd-accelerated innovation.

Invite the crowd, let in the light,

dial up the desire.

And the hardest part about that is probably the light,

because it means you have to open up,

you have to show your stuff to the world.

It's by giving away what you think is your deepest secret

that maybe millions of people

are empowered to help improve it.

And, very happily, there's one class of people

who really can't make use of this tool.

The dark side of the web

is allergic to the light.

I don't think we're going to see terrorists, for example,

publishing their plans online and saying to the world,

"Please, could you help us to actually

make them work this time?"

But you can publish your stuff online.

And if you can get that wheel to turn,

look out.

So, at TED,

we've become a little obsessed with this idea of openness.

In fact, my colleague, June Cohen, has taken to calling it "radical openness,"

because it works for us each time.

We opened up our talks to the world,

and suddenly there are millions of people out there

helping spread our speakers' ideas,

and thereby making it easier for us

to recruit and motivate the next generation of speakers.

By opening up our translation program,

thousands of heroic volunteers --

some of them watching online right now, and thank you! --

have translated our talks

into more than 70 languages,

thereby tripling our viewership in non-English-speaking countries.

By giving away our TEDx brand,

we suddenly have a thousand-plus

live experiments in the art of spreading ideas.

And these organizers,

they're seeing each other, they're learning from each other.