Last year, when a bunch of us from the West Mids went to SXSW Interactive, Stef set up a site to aggregate out various blog posts, photos, videos and Twitter updates. It sort of worked and it sort of didn’t work but it was a useful experiment. This year for various reasons Stef can’t make SXSWi so I asked him if I could do something with the site. He said yes.
So far there I know of 28 people from our chunk of the country going to Austin for the Interactive strand of SXSW and I expect to uncover more over the next fortnight. They’re coming from a pretty wide range of areas and many of them are going for the first time. Aggregating that lot in real time would probably produce more noise than signal so a more useful thing, given I’ve been fielding many questions lately about how SXSWi works, would be to provide a resource we can build together to help each other negotiate the delicious craziness. And that, my friends, means we’re talking about a wiki.
SXSWM.com is the site and while I’m ostensibly running it anyone who is going to SXSWi from the West Midlands can have an account to edit it. The most useful section is Who’s Going with links (where I could find them) to company websites, blogs and Twitter accounts. For the rest of the wiki I’ve throw up some pages with a bit of information to start things off. If people find it useful to ask questions or collect resources on the site then great, and if they don’t, well, it doesn’t really matter. The point is it’s there, just in case.
If you’re going and would like an account, let me know and I’ll sign you up. If you’d just like to edit your entry on the big list but don’t want to bother with the wiki, again, let me know and I’ll sort it. And if I’ve missed you off do get in touch. The list is mainly based on hearsay so I’m sure I’ve missed a few.
Right now I just want to keep it closed to those who are going but I do want to have a facility for folks back home to interact with those lucky enough to go. This could be a page which doesn’t need registration to edit, it could be a whole ‘nother platform on the site or maybe something as simple as the #sxswm hashtag on Twitter would suffice. I’d welcome suggestions as to what might work.
Yes, this doesn’t include the Music strand of SXSW. There’s scope to develop another section of SXSWM.com for music-types going to Austin this year but, to be honest, I wouldn’t know what’s needed. I’m open to suggestions though (as long as I don’t have to manage anything!)