The fumblings of a SxSW newbie
By philhawksworth 17 Mar 2011.
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This year, I finally made it to South by South West Interactive, arguably the main event in the calendar of geeks and web professionals all over the world. It has proved to be an inspiring and informing event, but it wasn't without the occasional frustration.
One such frustration for me is the sheer size of the event. The breadth of content is a little staggering. While this kind of scale can be a wonderful thing, it does make it difficult to manage your schedule unless you've done some solid preparation before you arrive. I had not, and so I've been feeling like I'm scrambling to digest the options and select the right session to attend before it's too late. Once you're in that cycle, it's hard to get back on top of things.
I have, however, attended some excellent talks and discussions, ranging from debates on Net Neutrality (for which I had to forgo the panel on The Future of Microformats), Discussions on what agencies might learn from the approaches used by software companies (which cost me the chance to see a presentation on using Agile game tools for productive development team management) to user experience design in the field of time and temporality (at the expense of seeing an excellent discussion on Federating the Social Web).
There are plenty of tools popping up to help you avoid missing the good stuff, and make the most of your SxSW experience. I made extensive use of location-based applications such as Foursquare and Gowalla for finding my buddies, and the rather lovely lanyrd.com for planning my session attendance. Then of course, there's Twitter for keeping in touch and blabbing on about the latest cool bauble I'd seen or been told about.
Even with all of this though, I'm still feeling like it's a struggle to digest all that SxSW has to offer while avoiding missing some of the good stuff.
The trick, I guess, is to accept that you simply can't do it all, and that you'll miss some of the things that you'd really like to see. If you try to swallow it all, you'll simply choke.
Another frustration, which is most likely a side-effect of the scale of the event, is the quality of some of the sessions. By and large, I was impressed with the content, and in some cases, rather inspired, but on a number of occasions, I found myself listening to talks which were quite weak. I noted that the ability to write a compelling title for a talk, complete with blistering buzzwords and hints of insights into subjects with current industry attention, doesn't necessarily translate into a session which delivers on what it promises. As a good friend of mine put it, some of the sessions where "all vegetables and no meat" (an expression I'm sure his vegetarian fiance might frown at!).
One thing which most certainly did not disappoint, was the city of Austin and its gracious citizens. The city expands massively in size as the movie, music, and techie geeks of the world arrive each year, and I found its people fun, friendly and welcoming. The city itself has fantastic charm and provides an incredible festival atmosphere for the duration. I was sad to leave and I'm already planning my return.
My puzzle for next year will be: how to see more, learn more, sleep more and talk. I'm sure that I only scratched the surface.
