You decide who speaks at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival

Hugh Forrest, the director of the Interactive portion of the famed South by Southwest conference in Austin, TX, is one of the savviest conference organizers out there. Since 1994, he’s been instrumental in channeling the rock-and-roll energy of the SxSW Music festival to the geeks, always making diversity a priority. In a nod to the open collaborative spirit driving the Web, over the last few years he’s introduced an interactive panel-picker as a way for attendees to influence the conference content.

It’s only in its second year, but it has already broadened the diversity of potential participants in the conference. Anyone can propose a panel or presentation, and attendees can preview and rate these submissions based on what they’re interested in seeing. Like Threadless does with its t-shirt design contest, the SxSW panel-picker directly reflects the interests of its users, and by not displaying the votes of other users it keeps the system from being unduly gamed or manipulated. Hugh and his team are still the final arbiters of the event programming, so they can still curate the content based on their own experience and judgement.

To help you get the most out of the panel picker I’ve done the work for you. I’m recommending the following list of panels and presentations. If you like the kinds of things we discuss on this blog, you’ll probably like these. If you agree I encourage you to login to the panel picker and rank them highly.

In the self-promotion department, I’ll first point you to two presentations proposed separately by myself and Lane Becker:

Here are the rest of the suggestions. There were almost 700 panels to sift through, though the elegant implementation by Lindsey Simon makes it easy to filter the list to a more manageable number by keyword, skill level, and category. Nonetheless, it’s intimidating to start the process of winnowing through them. I hope this list helps shorten your path.

This entry was written by Thor Muller and posted on August 23, 2007 at 11:15 pm and filed under appearances, co-creation, conferences. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

2 Comments

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  1. Justin
    Posted August 25, 2007 at 8:40 am | Permalink

    Thank you for sifting through the panel picker – you picked some good ones! I’m honored to be included there.

    SXSW is a social network, the panel picker is probably mostly a popularity contest. If I find time, I’ll wade through searches and keywords for topics to choose panels by people I’ve never heard of with intriguing new idears. Good luck to the people new to the event, who wish to debut on stage!

  2. Thor Muller
    Posted August 25, 2007 at 9:52 am | Permalink

    Great point, Justin. While I tried to keep it diverse I’m sure I was biased in two ways: people who I’ve seen present and enjoyed (and in several cases they’re my friends), and topics that are relevant to the kinds of things Satisfaction is about.

    There are undoubtedly more great presentations by phenomenal presenters that I missed. This is what Hugh’s job as director should entail–looking beyond the popularity contest to give.

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