Angela Shah
Voting is underway for panels at South By Southwest Interactive, as well as for SXSW Music, SWSW Film, and SXSWedu.
More than 4,000 panel ideas have been submitted for the four conferences on topics ranging from technology and women’s empowerment to virtual health and how to use “big data” for just about everything.
The SXSW PanelPicker is the online platform for voting. Create an account and you can vote for one panel proposal for the film, music, and education conferences. You can choose three for SXSW Eco, which is the next up, taking place October 7-9.
SXSW Eco will features speakers as diverse as actor Adrian Grenier, the star of “Entourage,” and Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Texas Xconomists Kirk Coburn, founder of Surge Accelerator, and Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet and a professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin, will both be leading Startup Showcases. Coburn will also be part of a panel discussion called “Big Oil: An Ally to Cleantech?”
South by Southwest, which started out as a small music festival in Austin, TX, many, many moons ago, has evolved into a conference juggernaut. (It next takes place the first two weeks of March.) Organizers first asked for help on panel selection from the crowd in 2007 for SXSW Interactive. The education and eco gatherings began seeking input last year, while SWSW V2V, the most recent of which concluded a few weeks ago, will add in the voting process 2014.
Voting makes up 30 percent of the final decision-making process, with 40 percent of it coming from the SXSW advisory board. SXSW staff casts the remaining 30 percent of the votes.
The deadline for placing your vote is September 6 but there is a lot to choose from, so it’s probably best to start your homework. If you need a little guidance, Facebook’s “SXSW Panel Pimper” page has some suggestions.
We at Xconomy Texas are still rummaging through all the offerings. Let us know which panels are the most interesting to you.
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