Rider

A guest, speaker, or performer’s requirements, in two halves. The technical half covers the mic they want, whether they sit or stand, what has to be plugged in, and how their slides or audio get played. The hospitality half covers arrival time, water, food, and a quiet place to wait. At professional scale it arrives as a contract attachment, often with a stage plot drawn alongside it. At community scale nobody will hand you one, so the guest’s liaison asks the questions in plain language and writes the answers down. An unasked rider becomes an emergency during load-in.

Source: Standard live-production and touring practice; documented in published event glossaries (Bizzabo, Convene, Crescat) as a performer or speaker’s contractual technical and hospitality requirements. The community-scale version of the same checklist appears in the TEDx Organizer Guide’s day-of chapter, which tells organizers to settle in advance where a speaker gets ready, where they are mic’d, where they sit, and to keep water and snacks in the space where they wait.

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