Quizno's Sub, one of my few vegetarian treats
This year an opportunity came around to go to Texas Austin and the infamous SXSWi festival. I was lucky enough to go with a delegation of independent producers and artists from England, supported by the Arts council.
If I were to summarise what my personal SXSWi experience was like I’d say it was all about, people discovery, near effortless networking, receptive ears, learning by actively listening and practicing your business pitch all rolled into one big event.
Theres always the promise there, to be swept up in endless rush of enthusiasm and excitement and come back feeling pretty excited and confident about what you’re doing. and for me it was kind of like that. The mere mention of it certainly opened some doors.
Below the jump is my semi reflective trip summary / pointers for other people who go.
Why go
Jessamyn West, of library world fame!
As a company, we’re thankfully doing well enough to be comfortably thinking about the long term prospects of what we do and bootstrapping the development of our own interactive products. So I really wanted to get the most out of the trip in terms of using the opportunity as a sounding board for our library product idea, making connections and learning.
The trip essentially presented the perfect condensed and intensive opportunity to meet new people, evaluate opportunities to possibly work together and more importantly have great learning opportunities.
Austin Convention Centre
Opportunities that will fuel direction when we’re feeling inspired to make new things. So I tried to prepare for it as much as I could, but some things you can prepare for until you experience them. If anything I definitely want to go next year as well.
Observations of a newbie
1. SXSWi is about scale. Its just huge. Ive never been to a larger conference with so many delegates, with such variety and so many concurrent interesting things happening!
SXSWi takes place in the Austin convention centre and a few of the neighbouring venues, mainly the Hilton hotel and its many ballrooms. I live in a town with hills, and I rarely walk very far. So wear some comfy shoes. One of the things you experience at SXSW is walking, and lots of it.
2. SXSWi isn’t and shouldn’t be about stuff you know about.
Having been very interested in the interplay of media art, visualisation and gaming for a while and more recently social media, a lot of the sessions I chose to go to were in some way related to these things and in some cases having followed the advice of SXSWi veterans, I deliberately avoided going to things I knew more about. This was a good move. I was exposed to speakers I knew nothing about and ideas that took me out of my comfort zone.
Andy Budd of Clearleft and CSS Mastery fame
3. A lot of the interesting conversations were unsurprisingly, with delegates who were sitting down having lunch somewhere or with speakers who had just finished and were standing around talking to people who had attended their session. SXSWi was one of the most twitterised conferences Ive ever been too, and one of the most WIFI friendly places as well. Each session has its own hashtag and following it really ads to your intake of the session and what things you should be paying attention to.
4. Go to a meetup. I found in some of the sessions people were discussing meetups I was interested in via the twitter hashtag.
5. Variety is the spice of SXSWi, Most conferences have one or two tracks, and these tracks are pretty delineated, so you know where you stand. If you have many interests, its actually quite hard picking which things to go to. Pick strategically. use tools like sitby.us and the SXSWi panel picker religiously.
Petite url: http://rith.co.uk/nzkny
