Alan Schaaf, the founder and CEO of image sharing site Imgur, will be one of the headline acts at this year’s TEDx Wellington tedxwellington.com event.

Schaaf’s been programming professionally since he was 14 and has started two bootstrapped companies. He created Imgur in 2009 and has since grown an online community of millions.

His TED talk will be on the future of communities.

Schaaf will be joined at the 24 August event by Inspiring Stories head Guy Ryan, a social entrepreneur who’s also worked on Festival for the Future and New Zealand’s first social enterprise accelerator, Live the Dream.

Another speaker is local startup investor and advisor Dave Moskovitz, who’s also on the council of InternetNZ and the Open Polytechnic. He’s been a key figure in the New Zealand Startup Weekend movement and was a mentor during the Lightning Lab accelerator programme.

Artist and designer Adam Ben-Dror has also joined the lineup. A graduate of the Victoria University School of Design, he re-imagined the designed of the family vacuum cleaner and his work spans art, design and technology.

Among his international exhibitions are Pinokio, held at the Barbican Centre in London.

Other speakers from the design industry are Dylan Coburn, the animator behind Karactaz Animation, which has worked on Hulk and The Agents of S.M.A.S.H; and Avenger’s Assemble TV Productions for Marvel Animation Studios. He’ll be joined by young multi-disciplinary designers Fraser Callaway and Oliver Ward.

The organisers have also secured entrepreneur Gabe Davidson, who set up the Wellington Chocolate Factory and last year co-founded a ‘bean to bar’ chocolate factory with chocolatier Rochelle Harrison.