Gail is a television presenter, having worked on shows such as Top of the Pops, The Big Breakfast and The Gadget Show. In 2005 she began to suffer from alopecia areata, causing her to lose much of her hair. She refused to wear a hat or wig, deciding instead to maintain a public profile and raise awareness of the condition. She became Ambassador for the Little Princess Trust, a charity which provides wigs to children with hairloss.

Gail will talk about making the most of what life throws at you.

We’re really excited that Gail has agreed to talk at the event. The full list of amazing speakers is available here.

We have a few tickets left for the event, and you can obtain them, for free, here.

Caroline Bosher (@carolinebosher)

A Special Agent on a mission to transform businesses through exceptional branding and connections.  Caroline has a passion for infiltrating high calibre networks, uncovering remarkable customer experiences, and working with her team to co-ordinate all components required to create strong brand attraction.  Working in London, Sydney and New York she ‘cross-pollinates’ ideas across industries, cultures and entrepreneurs to ensure her clients stand out from the crowd and build their tribe of raving fans.

Caroline will use her experience of working with Ed Hardy (fashion chain) to highlight the importance of ensuring your organisation protects its identity.

Dougald Hine (@dougald)

Dugald works with ideas – exploring and developing them, and collaborating to put them into practice. This involves writing, speaking, bringing people together from different worlds to find common narratives, then helping to steer the ideas that come out of those conversations into reality.

In 2006, he co-founded School of Everything: a Web 2.0 startup that makes it really easy to find people near you to teach or learn with in your local area. The site won a New Statesman New Media Award and a Prime Minister’s Catalyst Award in 2008, and was an Official Honoree in the 2009 Webby Awards.

He is still involved in School of Everything, but now spends most of my time on other projects. These currently include:

Space Makers – an online and offline network, connecting people involved in creating collaborative spaces, including co-working, hack labs, arts spaces, social centres and temporary use of empty shops

The Dark Mountain Project – a new literary movement for an age of global disruption.

Dougald will talk about the importance of community involvement in making a project happen.

Maz Nadjm (@mazi)

Maz Nadjm is responsible for Sky Portal’s social media strategy and implementation. The Sky Portal has over 1 billion monthly page impressions and many millions of unique visitors. Maz works closely with each Sky site, providing on-going technology and strategy assessment within the context of the competitive landscape and Site needs.

In addition to his role at Sky, Maz has launched the Times Online commenting system. Prior to Sky, Maz co-founded Rareface and InfieldParking.com, a social networking site and growing online community of NASCAR racing fans in commercial partnership with its most popular driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Maz is a mentor for start ups, video blogger for Sky News TechTalk, founder of www.Mazi.TV and CozyTweetup.com.

Maz will talk about ways in which communities can be given a voice, and how this should be handled.

Sadly the following speakers are now no longer able to attend. We are hoping that they may provide us with videos to be shown on the evening: Michael Acton Smith, Paul A Smith and John Carnell.

As the term ‘Orenda’ came from the book ‘They have a word for it’ written by Howard Rheingold, Howard can be safely described as the inspriration for this event, albeit unwittingly so.

We are proud to announce that Howard has agreed to be the Honorary Inspirator & Instigator for TEDxOrenda, and in support of this he has agreed to make a short introductory video for us which will be shown at the start of TEDxOrenda. This is a great honour as Howard is widely credited with inventing the term  ‘virtual communities’.