Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Some SXSWi panels for your consideration

I'm planning to attend South by Southwest Interactive 2011, which is a terrific cross-disciplinary tech conference. Last year I organized a panel on coworking - a panel that made partially because people like you went to the PanelPicker and supported the panel.

This year, I hope you'll go back to the PanelPicker and consider putting your thumbs-up on three offerings:

Gavin Bell works for Nature, but readers of this blog might recognize his book, Building Social Web Applications. In this panel, Bell and his panelists will discuss how to apply social psychology - particularly activity theory - to understand and design social web applications. It's a very timely panel organized by someone who knows both sides of the equation.


Liz Elam owns LINK Coworking, which will be opening next month in North Austin. She knows a lot about coworking and about general workplace trends, and she and her panel will examine different aspects of these trends. If you're looking for insight into work environments, work tools, and work relationships, this panel should fit the bill.

"Hold on Loosely: How Loose Organizations Work"
Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin
This is my core conversation offering. Instead of speaking at people, I'll lead a small-room discussion on loose organizations, how they work, and how they can scale up to meet challenges. If you're involved in a coworking space, a startup, a network of freelancers or subcontractors, or other professions that involve temporary, loosely affiliated professionals (think: real estate development, graphic design, event planning, financial planning), then think about voting this up and coming to the discussion.

Take a look and see what you think. And if you have other panels you'd like to nominate, leave them in the comments!

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