Vancouver’s Got A Posse at South By Soutwest Interactive 2011

Once again that time of year has sprung upon us. If you haven't noticed a strange influx of SXSW chatter on the internet, then you are one of the lucky ones. Geeks all around the world clamored for three strenuous weeks to pull together amazing and awe-inspiring proposals for potential panels during the 2011 SXSW Festival that takes place in Austin, TX every spring. This festival is a pure landscape of geek heaven with a 4 day Interactive portion of the festival geared specifically towards technology, geekery and all things 'internet'.

So a few weeks ago panel proposal submissions were due so the main SXSW committee could review them all in a deep selection process for their Panel Picker. The radical thing about SXSW is that despite the immense size and overall geek importance of this conference/festival, it still gives audience access to helping to decide the final programming schedule. The Panel Picker is a voting system that allows people to cast votes for favorite panels and leave comments for proposal submissions. This system of voting constitutes a rough 30% of the overall vote for each panel which may not seem a lot but can be a major break for certain proposals.

Every year the city of Vancouver has a strong representation at the SXSW Festival, particularly the Interactive section. These four days of networking, workshops and presentations seem to vibe well with the West Coast Canadian crowd. Our big little city of Vancouver seems to be on the map of players in the technology scene year after year. With this large amount of Canadians present at the SXSW Festival it is no likely wonder that we would also stake a notable claim into the Panel Picker selections process as well. 

I wanted to pull together a up-to-date list of panel proposals from Vancouverites that have been selected for the Panel Picker process. There are some pretty awesome panels proposed this year, roughly around 2500 hundred panels. With the voting process open until August 27th, it is nice to have some handy guides to sort through the endless pages of geekery proposed for 2011. The cool feature of the Panel Picker is that you can vote as many times as you want for as many different panels as your heart's desire.