The festival feel (SXSW Day 5) 2

Everything is bigger in Texas! The SXSW interactive festival is huge, it is amazing and we want to come back. How can a set of geek-talks feel like a rock festival?

Facts and Figures

• Approximately 300 talks, panels, interviews and bookreadings.
• Over 700 speakers and panellists
• The rumour is that there are mer than 12.000 attendees for the interactive festival (approximately 10 000 in 2008)

So what makes it a festival?

1) Quantity – a lot of everything

• Loads of talks, panels, bookreadings, podcasts, music, tradeshow, events, games, free food, free beer, movies and evening parties with everything from bowling to storytelling.

• The concept seem to be pick-and-choose. There are no obvious tracks or themes and you just walk around and try different things.

• If the session does not you suit you just flip up your computer to update your blog, twitter or leave.

2) Social media and the truly interactive nature

• The extensive use of social media is striking.

• People  state their twitter name when asking questions to the panel, and it is more important than business cards.

• The use of hash-tags is very extensive and the SXSW festival has hundereds of channels where people have posted tweets in relation to an event. The speaker gives out the hash-tag before the session in order to follow the tweet for the session.

• Everybody is constantly texting, tweeting, programming, blogging or following the chat-rooms of the session they are in and nobody is offended. The technology is truly enmeshed with the experience. It is truly an interactive festival.

3) The Americans – Bless ‘em

• First of all. There are loads of people at the convention centre and everywhere else in Austin. It’s the people that makes the festival.

• Another success factor is the American friendliness and enthusiasm. Everybody are friendly and very keen on getting to know as many new people as possible. The Southern hospitality is definitively a key feature of the festival. We have talked to heaps of people and even made some friends :)

The cons

Ok – we are absolutely sold on SXSW,  but to be fair, here are the cons.

• The program is not an example of bad usability, it is Horrible Usability! Alphabetic listings of sessions by title, and then a timetable with short names that doesn’t start with the same letter … With more than 300 talks to choose for, this makes it very hard …

• The website is not only ugly, it is not especially functional either. Quite embarrassing, in fact.

• Some of the panels promise blood and end up quite anemic. When I go to see a Browser War I expect some disagreement..

Getting into the festival feel

The festival feel did not come the first day. We tried to plan everything and see what we thought was most useful for our work. By the second session, we found the feel. The SXSW is about inspiration and talking to people. Lots of the talks are videoed or made podcasts of, so you’re unlikely to completely miss the gems. So we just started to go to whatever seemed interesting at the moment and went along with people who recommended sessions we had not considered before. We also took the time to blog, twitter and be a part of the interaction in that domain.

Our advice

1. Go to SXSW next year.
2. Relax, you can’t see and do everything. Just take things as you go along.
3. Talk to people, and join the social activites.

Thank you Austin and SXSW!

We love you!

SXSW Interactive Overall (6 cows is best score)

Technical content

Presentation