Anyone planning on (or considering) attending SXSW Interactive in Austin? http://2008.sxsw.com/interactive/

I'll be presenting, and would love to meet up with fellow nonprofiteers.

Email me if you’d like an invite to the SXSW Interactive Nonprofiteer google group, where we’ll plot plots of goodness! rweidinger at commonknow dot com

Sessions by topic here: http://2008.sxsw.com/interactive/programming/panels_by_category/

A few presentations I thought might interest this list:
Friend Me! Vote for Me! Donate Now! (Julie Barko Germany)
Lost in Translation? Top Website Internationalization Lessons (Stephanie Booth)
Top Ten Lessons Learned in E-Commerce (Tony Hsieh)
Wireframing in a Web 2.0 World (Richard Rutter)

Only 9 days left till voting closes for the 2008 SXSW Interactive panels. Please consider voting for the NpTech panels listed below by September 21st. (You have to create a login account on the SXSW Panel Picker to rate the panels).

TechSoup has proposed two sessions:

Net Tuesday Houston's co-organizer, Ed Shipul, has proposed a SXSW Interactive panel, Pimp My Nonprofit: Real Nonprofits Kicking Ass with Online Technology.

Panelists will include Ed representing Schipul: The Web Marketing Company, nonprofit tech consultant and superstar Beth Kanter, Revenue and Brand Strategist for Nonprofit and Social Enterprise, Rachel Weidinger, former Communications and Technology Coordinator of Interplast Seth Mazow, and Erin Denny, Senior Product Manager of YouthNoise Initiatives.

You can vote here till September 21.

Netsquared has returned to Austin for the SXSW Interactive Festival-- and this year we're hosting a panel. It's called "NPO 2.0: Widgets for Good Challenge," and it features Silona Bonewald (http://assistorg.org/), Zack Rosen (http://civicspacelabs.org/, http://chapterthreellc.com/)and Rosalyn Lemieux (http://neworganizing.com/). If you happen to be here, too, join us at our panel on Monday, March 12 from 5-6 pm.

Would anyone like to gather for an informal Net2 meet up directly after the session...?

If I'm not posting here or on the sxsw site, you can find me on twitter at  http://twitter.com/jenschlegel

I'll be there late Friday night - Monday late afternoon, and would love to meet folks, talk shop, imbibe.

On AIM: ianwrootslab; on gtalk: iwilker. 

-- Ian

The SXSW Interactive Panel Picker deadline is today!

Please consider voting for the panels that NetSquared has proposed:

So that you don't have to scroll through all 192 proposals, in the Community category we proprosed:

The Web to the Rescue: Net-centric Approaches to Disaster Recovery From tsunamis, earthquakes and hurricanes, to terror attacks and armed conflicts, global disasters dominate our news feeds and devastate lives. How have internet technologists quickly organized collective responses? Why is the social web uniquely positioned to take on this challenge? Public-private collaborations are also playing an increasing role in mobilizing people and resources. Let’s discuss the success stories, the obstacles, lessons learned, and where the web-based road to disaster recovery is heading.

Today this post comes to you courtesy of the email center in the middle of the tradeshow floor here at SXSW. It's Day 3-- and the weather is cooling just a bit before our last day tomorrow. Though "cool" is definitely a relative term, considering I read something about yesterday about SNOW in the Bay Area...

Last night I had the pleasure of meeting another member of the Net2 Community-- web consultant, Alexandra (many of you know her as "Alex") Samuel. We all gathered, in web 2.0 appropriateness, at the Yahoo!, Delicious, Flickr party at the Iron Cactus, an Austin staple on 6th St. Billy, Marshall, Alex and I enjoyed the open vibe and the open air of the 2nd floor patio.                                          

On Saturday I had an opportunity to hear James Surowiecki discus the potential of intelligent group forecasting and decision-making from his book,The Wisdom of Crowds

3 things necessaryto make groups intelligent:
(1) aggregating people’s judgments in a genuine bottom-up decision making process
(2) diversity: experience, background, pov
(3) independence of thought: Independence based solely on individual  knowledge, information or intuitions (No piggy-backing on others' ideas)

Woooff.  It’s humid here in Austin, but the friendly people of sxsw and the interesting programming is keeping me awake and engaged.  I'll stop being a baby now and start sharing my notes with my  brothers and sisters in the not-for-profit world who couldn’t make it to Austin.

Here are my notes from yesterday's talk with Jason Fried of 37Signals.

JF's rules to building killer software:
* Less is more
* Don’t try and be clever
* Simple things need to be solved
* Software is not the solution
* Give people a simple framework
* Constraints: seek them out and embrace them
* Fug planning: making decisions b/c it happens before you have information to make decisions is stupid
* Hire people who are passionate, curious and motivated
* Responding to your users/people too quickly is a mistake
* Functional specs are political documents that are really about covering your ass b/c all of us interpret abstract things differently
* When building software, build the interface first
 

Yesterday I posted my first blog entry (as if my newbie-ness isn't obvious) from the lobby of my hotel. The "free in-room wireless" connection was just not happening, even after two staff people took a look at it. So I typed that entry from one of the two desktops downstairs in the "business center," while three people waited in line, looking over my shoulder, sighing impatiently. I've since relocated, and today I'm happy to report that I'm posting in my pjs from the comfort of my own room. Ah, bliss.

I made my way to the Convention Center, only after a 30-minute wait for a cab.  This has been the norm since we got here-- apparently,  there are four-times more people here than last year, which is like eight-times more than when SXSW Interactive began. All hotels within a five-mile radius are completely sold out, and it's no less than an hour wait to grab some grub at even the skankiest hole-in-the-wall. While these huge crowds look like good news for the tech economy again, it can pose a real challenge on the logistical end. Somehow I managed to catch a few excellent speakers and panels, including James Surowiecki, Kathy Sierra and more (click thru to full post)...