These fine folks, with Knowbility Executive Director Sharron Rush at the top left, are the Knowbility crew who managed the Knowbility booth during the Trade Show at SXSWi. The Accessible Insights Blog from Knowbility recently moved, so check them out in their new home.
In an astonishing feat of speed, SXSW is already making podcasts of some of the main events such as keynotes available. See SXSW Interactive Videos and Podcasts.
As is true of all InterACT courses, these six new courses contain competencies (the stuff students need to master in order to pass the class), assignments with grading rubrics, exam questions, recommended texts and readings, and technologies required to teach the course.
Aarron Walter (@aarron) made a Twitter list of all the contributors to the InterACT project. Follow @aarron/InterACT.
Remember the incident at SXSW with the way Sarah Lacy interviewed Mark Zuckerberg? This year it was Twitter founder Evan Williams being interviewed by Umair Haque. There wasn’t a huge uprising of anger this year, there was just a mass exodus from the room because it was sooooooo boring. Look at the remarks on Twitter about it. The SXSW audience wants a particular question or set of questions asked. Or they want an interviewer who injects less ego into the conversation. Whatever the reason, when attendees don’t get what they want, the interview is effectively over or is slammed in the backchannel.
One solution, of course, is to drop the interview format from SXSW keynotes. Maybe the audience at SXSW is just too critical to accept any interviewers work.
But another solution occurs to me. Set up a system in advance through Twitter or by some other method to take questions from the attendees. Maybe the 20 or 30 best questions get asked by the interviewer, who is nothing but a conduit for the questions the audience wants answered. BlogHer has done this with interviews of people like Health and Human Services Secretary Katherine Sibelius and it works well. At BlogHer, they even name the names of the people who submitted to question. This puts the ego issue in the audience’s lap, yet lets the most interesting questions reach the person being interviewed.
I feel sure Hugh Forrest and the organizers at SXSW are going to give this year’s mass exodus interview scene lots of thought. So, Hugh, here’s my two cents on the problem.
The South by Southwest Interactive Conference (SXSWi) ongoing in Austin the last few days is famous for several reasons. It’s a gathering place for techies of every stripe, but the techies I want to bring to your attention today are the women. A hallmark characteristic of SXSWi is its equal treatment of women.
There were four keynote speakers. Two were women: danah boyd and Valerie Casey. They talked about privacy and publicity and about the role the interactive community can play in sustainability. Two brilliant and inspiring women giving the important keynote talks this year.
There were some BlogHer faces you might recognize. One panel on 8 Ways to Deal with Bastards featured Karen Walrond, and Catherine Connors (herbadmother) and Susan Wagner were in the audience, as was I.
I randomly ran into fascinating women all the time. I sat down at a table to check my schedule and started chatting with this woman.
She works for Oxfam International and had all sorts of interesting things to say about the work and campaigns that Oxfam is involved with. When I asked her if she knew about Beth Kanter from BlogHer, she was full of praise.
This group of Women Techies United threw a small get together during the conference. Some of the action at that event is shown in the accompanying slide show. Each women took the opportunity to tell who she was, what she was interested in, give contact information. The talk veered toward who was willing to speak at those conferences where there is less dedication to making sure women are on the program than you see at SXSW. From there the conversation branched out into all sorts of other interests shared by women.
One of the most informative and helpful panels I attended (and there are plenty of those) was on Black Blogging Rockstars and featured two women, DeDe Sutton and Gina McCauley. I happened to sit next to Skye Kilaen at this panel, who was working on doing tech support for the BlogHer Ad Network while we waited for the panel to start. Just one of many people who snatched moments away from the action at SXSW to do their normal work.
There were many other women at SXSWi, I’ve hardly scratched the surface. I took a lot more photos than these and posted them in a SXSW 2010 set on Flickr or in the previous few days of slideshows. I tried to capture a feeling of what it’s like to attend SXSW with these photos. You may see some familiar faces in the crowds.
