PechaKucha foundation

pechakucha foundation

Aims

1. To keep the global PechaKucha movement -- now in close to 300 cities with over 60 events a month -- growing in a sustainable manner, reviewing city applications and granting handshake agreements.

2. To keep city handshake agreements free, nor charge license fee for cities, ensuring PechaKucha Night can spread to every corner of the world without impediment, whether Kampala in Uganda or our most northern outpost Tromsø in Norway.

3. With revenue from sponsorship, donations and advertising the Foundation will start and support global initiatives such as the PechaKucha website "Presentations" section -- a global city archive of presentations -- and the Marc Hoekstra PechaKucha Award.

History

PechaKucha Night started as a simple idea for a one-off event, devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham architecture as the first event held at their creative kitchen SuperDeluxe in Tokyo, in February 2003. Since then it has grown into an international movement.

There was no business plan, no notion that the format would be so successful, so global. PechaKucha ran in Tokyo monthly for three years in SuperDeluxe before people started asking if they could run it in their own cities after visiting the event in Tokyo. No city had been asked to run a PechaKucha Night -- cities always asked Astrid and Mark. A simple application process was devised with each city being granted handshake agreements to run PechaKucha Night, mainly to stop people from stepping on one another's toes in cities around the world.

When the number of cities reached double figures, Klein Dytham architecture set up a simple website. It was based on a road sign format, but when the sign reached 70 cities the site was upgraded. The site has been upgrade twice since then to cope with the number of cities and events which now run at the rate of over 60 a month.

Funding

Klein Dytham architecture has sponsored PechaKucha since its inception in 2003, paying for all website development and staffing costs. As the number of cities and events have grown so have costs and staffing. In 2008, Autodesk, the world's leading architectural and creative sofware company, came on board as a sponsor and helped cover some of the running costs. Klein Dytham architecture still sponsor the movement by covering the considerable shortfall.

Lean Machine

Going forward one of the main aims of the Foundation is to make the PechaKucha movement sustainable and cover all running costs. As Klein Dytham architecture have run this in their "spare time," it is a rather "lean machine." Because we are so lean, we plan to put any surplus to the running costs towards global initiatives which benefit society at large, such as the Mark Hoekstra PechaKucha Award.

Structure

The Foundation is based in Japan as a legal non-profit organization -- our application is under approval. We are also in the process of establishing the PechaKucha Foundation as a 501(c) in the US.