South by Southwest Attendees: Organize!

The 2009 South by Southwest interactive (SXSWi) conference is rapidly approaching and this past weekend I had a crazy idea that I’d actually attend this year. Why? Because I’ve heard about some great networking parties that take place and that you basically have a great time. The keynotes and interviews were pretty interesting and one even struck some controversy, but everyone that I’ve spoken with ranted and raved over how it’s one of the conferences to go to each year.

So I’m making every effort to go and I hope that you are too. I’ve secured my hotel room just in case & now need to explore the chance of getting funding to pay for the rest of the trip and I’m golden.

But along the way of me going through the motions of making my reservations, I thought about how congested and unorganized it will be to get to meet people at SXSWi. I know that there are tons of events going on during March 13-18 in Austin, Texas and people just don’t rely on cell phones just to make phone calls. There are probably plenty of unannounced parties or word of mouth events that majority of folks don’t hear about. While you’re on the go, you need to be checking in with some of the happening people & know where they are.

So I created a wiki using PBWiki. It’s my first attempt, but I’m hoping that it will grow to become something useful to those attending SXSWi. I wanted to create a community so people can use it as a sounding board to share their insights on where the best parties are, what sessions they may be hosting/presenting at, and maybe use it to help connect folks with one another for lodging/transportation/networking. There’s much more that I could add so I’m looking to the community at South by Southwest to help me out here.

Just think that you’d find “user-generated content” from folks who highly recommend seeing panels organized by such folks like:

• Gary Vaynerchuck (Wine Library TV)
• Larry Chiang (Duck9.com)
• Tara Hunt (Citizen Agency)
• Lane Becker (Get Satisfaction, Inc.)
• Heather Champ (Flickr)
• Beth Kanter (Beth’s Blog)
• Louis Gray (LouisGray.com)
• John Gruber (Daring Fireball)
• Doc Searls (Linux Journal/Harvard Berkman Center)
• And many others…

The above names are preliminary according to SXSW and there may be others that you may know of – just list them on the Wiki.

If you’ll indulge me for one moment, I’d like to make an impassioned plea. I ask you to spread the word about this wiki. Not for me to gain fame or fortune for creating this wiki, but so people can get connected. I know, for me, I’d like to start following folks going there so I can keep up-to-date on the latest happenings. Personally, I like knowing a lot of stuff taking place at these events and meeting folks offline after interacting with them online at SXSWi seems like a great opportunity.

I’d love to know your thoughts on this effort. Is it helpful to you? What would you like to see also on the Wiki?

Please feel free to comment, post on the Wiki, tweet or share the link. If you want to make edits to the Wiki, you can simply by using the login email: sxsw2009 [at] hotmail.com and the password is sxsw2009.