Improving the SXSW panel voting

Coming up in March is the next South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive con­fer­ence. It’s one of the biggest gath­er­ings of new media people (mean­ing web folk) and it’s held in Texas. The con­fer­ence time-table is filled with talks. Who gets to talk at SXSW? That gets decided by online vote. While that seems like a neat idea at first, it has attrac­ted cri­ti­cism for not deliv­er­ing a qual­ity panel line-up.

Greg Story, over at Airbag, is quite artic­u­late on this matter:

There are six-hundred-and-eighty-three pro­posal sub­mis­sions for next year’s South by South West, and once again it’s up the the Internet to fil­ter through all of them and choose which ones are worthy of becom­ing real events.

How abso­lutely absurd.

I didn’t like the crowd­sourced vot­ing last year and with this aston­ish­ing amount of sub­mis­sions I fail to see how the qual­ity of the SXSW exper­i­ence is going to improve. I heard a lot of com­plaints about the lack of qual­ity in many of the pan­els so I don’t under­stand why the con­fer­ence lead­er­ship is extend­ing the program.

Source: Cross, Airbag.

Hugh Forrest, one of the organ­isers com­men­ted on the post and explained SXSW’s stance on the mat­ter. I still found myself agree­ing with Greg, and com­men­ted on pos­sible improve­ments for the choos­ing mechanism:

Hugh: Why not extend that idea by hav­ing the would-be pan­el­ists upload a snip­pet of their talk. That way you (and us) could rate their speak­ing abil­it­ies (fil­ter­ing out the mono­tones) and get an even bet­ter idea of the route they’re going to take their talk in.

Of course, it needn’t be lim­ited to audio…SXTube FTW

Source: Myself at Cross, Airbag.

I was hap­pily sur­prised Hugh then took the time to respond to me by email!

James,

I’ve been fol­low­ing the dia­logue on Airbag. Good stuff there — mean­ing, all dia­logue is good dialogue.

Re the sug­ges­tion of let­ting panel pro­posers add rich media to the Panel Picker, this is a good idea. And, one that we talked about last week.

Reasons we have decided not to do this for this year:

1) Still hav­ing some tech issues. So, best to try to work those out with the site as is before adding in new features.

2) Philosophically . . my con­cern is that the experts (who we most want to speak at SXSW) have the least time to put together a video for the site. So, in some ways, this might be coun­ter­pro­duct­ive to the ulti­mate goals here.

But . . again . . it’s a really good sug­ges­tion and some­thing that we are still kind of mulling about. Thanks for the feedback!

Best regards,

Hugh Forrest
(Published with his permission)

My response:

Hi Hugh,

I’m glad you’re enjoy­ing the con­ver­sa­tion on Airbag — all atten­tion is good atten­tion, right?

Thanks for get­ting back to me, I’m flattered that you took the time to respond personally.

As for your argu­ments, #1 I can sym­path­ise with, but #2, well… If the experts can take the time to
pre­pare a panel and go to a week long con­fer­ence, I ima­gine they can put in the extra 20 — 30 mins
to say some words into a micro­phone and upload it to one of the many audio/podcast sites.

The non-experts (who you’re try­ing to fil­ter out) will prob­ably have more time, and might dis­cover
in the pro­cess of record­ing some­thing good that they need to get their act together.

[..]

Again, thanks for tak­ing the time to mail me,

James

So what do you, the reader think? Is the choos­ing mech­an­ism fine? Is it com­pletely broken? Or does do the (often lack­ing) descrip­tions of pan­els just need some audio or video to give voters a bet­ter idea of what they’re vot­ing for?

(Hat tip to John Gruber who’s link I fol­lowed to Airbag in the first place.)

On: Buzz, Web • 22nd August of 2007