I’ve always thought of SXSW Interactive festival as our conference. This step-child of the Music and Movie fesitivals taking place each March in Austin, TX is our industry’s spring break, high school reunion, booze cruise and product showcase rolled into one.
It also doesn’t hurt that that the barbeque in Austin is awesome, too.
Another aspect of this conference being ours is that the powers that be at SXSW open up the panel and solo presentation submissions up for voting by the public.
Yes, you read that right.
You can log in, rate the panel’s concept as well as lodge a comment to go with it.
How many other conferences do that?
This year’s SXSW Interactive Panel Picker is released, which has led to of-all-things: hotel rooms getting booked faster than people can bemoan SXSW as having jumped the shark or nuked the fridge.
I know I was part of the chorus last year that stated that since SXSW Interactive has grown so massive that meeting friends by happenstance is almost impossible.
For example, thanks only to a string of last minute emails and text messages, I was able to coordinate a quick meetup with co-author Kevin Lawver right before the end of this past year’s festival.
The previous years? He and I took our time by hanging out going to nearby restaurants and burning rubber on a couple of treks to Salt Lick.
So, while the size has exploded—which is a good thing in the grand scheme of things—it means that the festival planners need all the help they can to put on the conference. Our conference.
If you have a few minutes, head on over to the Panel Picker and put in your two cents as to what kind of conference you want to see this March.
And while you are at the Panel Picker, I would appreciate your vote for my panel submissions:
- JavaScript for CSS Ninjas
- You move with ease in Photoshop. You can cut down designs into pieces and then reconstruct it into valid XHTML+CSS, but JavaScript stops you in your tracks. In this session, we look at how the JavaScript frameworks like jQuery let CSS ninjas control the interaction layer without losing your workflow momentum.
- Designing Our Way Through Web Forms
- Although forms make the Web go around, they are often ugly due the generic way in which browsers display them, not to mention irritating to our site’s visitors when they don’t work as expected. In this session, panelists will provide specific details on ways to successfully create compelling forms for your users.
Voting ends this Friday night.