Los Angeles Techies Hope To Hit SXSW
August 27th, 2008 by Benjamin KuoSouth by Southwest, the music/media/technology conference held in Austin every year, is coming up in March, and a group of Los Angeles technology folks has gathered together a panel talking about the technology community in LA. The group — which was organized by Sloane Berrent of CauseCast, and also includes Andrew Warner of Mixergy/Lunch 2.0, Kurt Daradics of MOTM, Kevin Winston of Digital LA, Mike Macadaan of Twiistup — is lobbying to get their panel heard at SXSW.
The group is hoping to help other communities learn from from the Los Angeles technology community with the panel, entitled “How LA Has Built A Successful Tech Community.” Interestingly enough, SXSW uses community voting to decide which topics and panels to include in the festival, and which panels to include are based mostly (but not entirely) on how many people vote for any specific topic. The group has a lot of competition–there are over 1200 topics being proposed for SXSW, ranging from “How to Monetize Twitter,” “Mental Health for Geeks,” to “I Get Paid To Go To SXSW.” Based on the number of people attending and interested in networking within the tech industry here, I suspect they have a good chance of getting selected. The last day for voting for their panel is tomorrow.
