Green room

The space where speakers, guests, and performers wait, prepare, and get mic’d before they go on. At scale it is a dedicated room with food and drink in it. At community scale it can be a curtained corner, a side office, or the quiet end of a hallway. What makes it a green room is not the door, it is that the guest is not standing in the crowd being introduced to strangers for the hour before their segment, which is the fastest way to send someone on stage already spent. Water, a chair, and their liaison nearby is the whole minimum.

Source: The TEDx Organizer Guide’s day-of-event chapter, which notes a green room is “not required, but is a great way to prep your speakers before their talk,” and lists the essentials: a check-in with each speaker on how they are and what they need, snacks and water available, and space and time set aside to mic them in advance so technical issues surface before the stage does. The term itself is long-standing theatre and broadcast usage, carried into event glossaries unchanged.

First used in: 2.5 · Program design: the show people remember.