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SXSW Interactive 2010 & Improvements for 2011
March 22, 2010 |
Over a beer last night with friend and supporter juzmcmuz from Made By Many (who brought 18 people from London), we talked about our overall impressions of SXSW Interactive this year. It was his first time attending, and it was my first since 2005, when Interactive was still relatively small compared to the thousands from startups, agencies, major and emerging brands, and independent bloggers and artists who blew up Austin this year. Here are a few highlights and recommendations for an even better 2011.
1. Fully Embrace Geo Experimentation
In some ways, Interactive has never been about talking, but rather about testing and iterating real tangible services, and SXSW's eager early adopters are able to demo great emerging services better than any. With Twitter and this year's rising stars FourSquare and Gowalla, the fun was in the participation. To keep in touch with friends and digerati alike during the conference, especially at night, FourSquare was best way to find people whose party you wanted to join. (Mashable even reported Foursquare has had 100,000 new users in the last 10 days.) I felt a bit lame that there isn't yet a FourSquare app for my Nokia N900, so was left back in time to 2009 browsing Twitter and Facebook for the latest info.
Other event driven startup services like Hot Potato and SitBy.Us tried to introduce their services through the conference. Unfortunately, they both would have needed a stronger initial base and some promotion by the organizers to be used by a critical mass. It would be great if the festival leveraged these event based start ups more intentionally into some kind of festival long user competition.
This is particularly important when realizing that most of the panel audiences were only about 50% present while tweet heckling or passing links during the talks. For those addicted to ever flowing Twitter hose of new tech and social innovation information, it's tough to find something truly new and innovative at the conference. But testing digital services with a bunch of other people in the same city for a week, now that's something you don't get every day. With additional support from the conference (like they did with special Foursquare badges for SXSW this year), we could pioneer and demonstrate what's possible with the amazing location based services of 2011.
2. Make Interactive Sustainability Leadership a Reality
A highlight for me was hearing Valerie Casey's keynote of the Designers Accord call out the Interactive community for being largely absent from our culture's drive toward a sustainable economy. While I'm unsure how much her presentation made an impact on the thousands of people in the room, I was so happy to see such a prominent venue for what I've been arguing are the best opportunities for people and agencies that build interactive experiences to demonstrate digital sustainability leadership.
The overall SXSW festival organizers have made a decent sustainability effort, having reduced shwag significantly, highlighting some innovate green design, and installing garbage cans with easy to understand icons for waste, recycling, and composting (the whole city of Austin needs them!). But the breakthrough behavior change, as with the rest of society, just hasn't really happened.
I would love to be happily surprised at SXSW Interactive 2011 when the next big competing social platforms are mashups of FourSquare and Mint.com that drive social behavior change toward #zerowaste and #transparency. For all the work that government, non-profits and businesses are already doing around sustainability, until there is a world class Nike+ style service that successfully incentivizes mainstream sustainable behavior, then interactive leadership has not yet stepped up to the plate.
3. HackDays for Great Music & Social Innovation
While the panel format will inevitably continue to unfortunately dominate conferences, SXSW Interactive should continue to innovate on the platform to generate more results out of our time together.
A good example of a session designed for more than talking was CauseLab's full day session dedicated to Ending Hunger. I only attended the tale end, but the group sessions generated 9 tangible ideas that could create breakthroughs toward solving hunger. Hoping for strong follow up as well.
The next level for SXSW Interactive 2011 would be if we were to do something similar to Music Hackday (see image from Music Hackday Boston) for innovating on APIs to either create great music apps or solve social and environmental problems. Especially given that the conference is a full 5 days long, it would be amazing if there could be a thread similar to the Seed Accelerator program, but focused on hacking existing APIs for social and environmental impact data to develop innovative solutions.
While I know that designing and coding for 12 hours at SXSW is not the most fun way of enjoying our time in Austin together, it is getting easier and easier to prototype ideas, and how cool would it be if we could connect talent like @infoharmoni and R/GA with social problem solvers like @seeclickfix and @expertlabs, to create actual tangible output on big screens and big attention of SXSW Interactive 2011?
Now that would actually be worthy of Valerie Casey's call for sustainability leadership from the SXSW Interactive crowd. What do you think?
Posted by Colin at March 22, 2010 9:55 PM
