Festivals in the Age of Instant Access

The submission deadline for SxSW is this Friday. This year I wanted to focus on the structural issues surrounding the conference system. So I starting working around this theme on “How being Hippy Hipster Punk helps with the Creation & Transmission of Knowledge.“ Also, I knew that I wanted to have some support for the hour-long panel. So it looks like the panel is now going to have the overall title “Festivals in the Age of Instant Access: How Attendees & Presenters Identify Themselves within the Connected Conference Community.” Here’s the abstract:

In May 2010, Andrew Hyde called for the death of major tech conference because the conference format represents a series of walls that prevents the dissemination of information from the conference floor to the real world. The argument was to position conferences as a series of informal conversations that impact the problems that conference attendee deal with on a regular basis. Whether you agree or not, the question that most attendees have to answer is “what’s the most effective use of my time?” The purpose of this panel will be to approach this question from three different positions. The first speaker will be talking from the position of the presenters with a paper called “How being Hippy Hipster Punk helps with the Creation & Transmission of Knowledge.” The second speaker will be talking from the position of the attendees with a paper called “Craft knowledge, craft beer, and the fluid transmission of tacit knowledge in extracurricular conference activities.” The third speaker will be talking from the position of fan communities within the conference community with a paper called “Do you Wanna Do Me or Be Me? Gender and Desire among Rolling Stones Fans.”

There are two reasons that I’m sharing this now. The first is I’ve got room for one more panelist. If you can create a 7 to 10 presentation based off of this abstract, then I would like to hear it. I have until August 4th to update and make changes to this panel. The second reason is that I’m starting a campaign to get this panel accepted through the panel picker. I will have the link posted on this site when it’s available. Please vote for it.