SXSWI‘m leaving for the airport, destination Austin (Texas) for South By Southwest (SXSW). Probably one of the biggest festivals on technology (mostly web based), film and music, SXSW has been running since 1987.

This will be my first time attending and if there is something I can already report on is that the preparation process (decide what to see, who to meet, where to hang out) is rather hectic and frustrating. Hundreds of events take place during March 12 to 21 -some official and some not- and discovering what’s going on there is not an easy task.

The organizers of SXSW do provide a lot of information themselves through the website and a couple of iPhone apps that should make your scheduling process easier. Just going through the content takes a lot of time and you’re always feeling you’re missing someone. On top of that, there are hundred other non-official tutorials on what to do, where to go, how to be sure not to miss the important stuff. SXSW shouldn’t be so much about finding famous names but discovering new ones, which makes the job a bit more difficult.

Some resources I’m using to organize my attendance:

And hopefully some not well deserved rants (but I can see how some of it will be real):

Are you attending SXSW interactive? I’ll be there from the March 12 to 17, let’s meet!

I’ll be reporting from this pages and twitter so stay tuned!

http://tcrn.ch/b7vTPJ

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Laurent Haug (blog, twitter), French entrepreneur and founder of the LIFT Conference (Switzerland, France, Korea), thinks there are three main directions that are influencing the Future of Conferences: conferences need to be more porous, come back to the moment and decentralize. These phenomenon move in separate directions or axis and pose extremely relevant challenges to the current event world.

Conferences need to be more porous

(starts at minute 2:20)

Lift takes place in Geneva, Marseille and Korea (Jeju) and there is no way that you should be penalized because you cannot follow us in one of the countries. It’s not that because you cannot afford to go to Korea that you should be cut from this conference … So now we are working on how we can, in a smart way, embed people from the outside inside a conference [...] where you are doesn’t really matter. [...] How do you handle that from a business perspective? How do they pay (or should they pay or not)?

Come back to the moment

(starts at minute 3:40)

There is a need to make the moment more unique, to make it more special and catch people’s attention because now everybody has their phones, and emails, etc. We need to go more to being like a theater, towards something that cannot really be captured with technologies (e.g. video registering a conference)… and if you’re not here, you really miss something!

Descentralization

(starts at minute 4:40)

Many conferences are growing into different areas (TEDx, Lift@Home, PICNIC Salon) [...] Instead of considering yourself a conference you consider yourself a community. And the conference is actually a community that happens to meet together two, three days a year at a specific location. [...] How do you allow your community to meet without you? How do you allow your community to extend itself and reach new people through the people that are already members? How do you control what’s happening outside and how much do you want to control it? [...] It’s like a Tupperware development of conferences where your conference is actually a recipe, it’s a set of values, it’s some processes,  it’s a way to approach things, it’s a community. How do you allow that to have it’s own existence and develop itself? As a conference organizer you cannot grow your model eternally. Lift works because we have 1,000 people but it would not work with 10,000 people. So how do you grow and how do you sustain with all of these constraints? I think one of the ways is to decentralize, lose control and let your community flow with your ideas and carry these ideas and values further.

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Low-Impact Lanyards Make Your Conference Greener

March 4, 2010

C onferences use plenty of non-green stuff (items that might have a high impact on the environment, create too much waste or just are not recyclable or reusable). Lanyards, the cord that holds your event badge, are one of these items. Often made of synthetic or plastic materials and have a brand logo printed on [...]

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[news] Le Web 2010 Announced – Save The Date

March 4, 2010

Save the date! Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, founders and organizers of the biggest Internet conference in Europe -Le Web Paris- have recently announced the dates and location of the 2010 edition: December 8th and 9th, 2010 at Les Docks in Paris, France.
The main numbers of the 2009 edition were:

2,500 participants
50 countries
300 journalists
15,000 tagged photos [...]

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Contribute to Picnic Festival 2010

March 1, 2010

A Picnic is more fun if you bring something of yourself! – says Marcel Kampman (on twitter), Picnic Festival’s new creative director (disclaimer: I work for Picnic as Marketing Manager).
Since I’ve been appointed as creative director for Picnic, a lot of people have shared their ideas and plans with me. And that’s great! This page [...]

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Your Event’s Tagline Gives the First Impression

February 24, 2010

The tagline of your conference is responsible for giving the first impression of what it’s all about and this should not be underestimated. An effective tagline will transmit your personality, your mission and your promise. It should capture the essence of your event and help communicate it in a simple and direct way.
There are dozens [...]

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[repost] Cool Ideas For Meetings 2.0

February 17, 2010

Interesting ideas on Conferences for Kids, Inflatable Multimedia, Holograms and more…

Via Trendhunter.com

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Your Conference Should Be (At Least) Useful, Relevant or Entertaining

February 14, 2010

The times when you could pull off a successful conference by just gathering in the same room a speaker (good or bad), a bunch of chairs and some people are over. If it’s only about the content, you can now avoid going to an event by finding it on the web or reading the latest [...]

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Eco-Minded Promotional Gadgets

February 13, 2010

Recently one of the spotters of Springwise published the eco-minded products of Fairware, which sells “promotional products for your conscience” that could be used as sustainable gadgets and giveaways for your event.
As a rule of thumb, better not to give away a crappy gadget that will have a negative effect on the environment (and taints [...]

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Remove Barriers Between Speaker and Audience (Lectern)

February 12, 2010

A typical mistake of many stage setups is that of hiding the speaker from the audience by adding (or not removing) obstacles between both. The most obvious obstacle on the podium is the lectern.
The TED team is famous for taking care of details that might seem minor but that have a huge impact in creating [...]

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