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Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

One Librarian’s Trip to SXSWi

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I have procrastinated writing about my South by Southwest- Interactive experience for six days. I was still procrastinating about an hour ago, when vacuuming my fiance’s apartment. Catch that? I was vacuuming rather than sit here and process my experience at an amazing event.

I think my reticence stems from a desire to compare SXSW-i to the dozen library conferences I have attended over the past decade. Without any disrespect to the professional organizations of librarians both local and national, this blew all of them out of the water. Of even more consequence, the sessions I attended at South by Southwest- Interactive were more pertinent to my profession than I ever dreamed. I hope the library world is paying attention. We may not be able to afford the speakers, but let’s start ruminating about the right to delete, content strategy, and the future of search. That said, I was in Texas, by the grace of my occasional employer, good friend and Southby roommate, Minneapolis’s Nicole de Beaufort of Fourth Sector Consulting.

I was proud of the turnout of Minnesotans, and ran into friends at every turn. Friday night included a meet-up of epic proportions: 22 people, 20 from Minnesota for seafood at the Boiling Pot. Sometimes you have to leave town to meet people who live in your own backyard.

At its surface, Southby is simply a conference held in the Conference Center in Austin, Texas spilling over into a neighboring Hilton and Mariott. Punctuated by parties, meet-ups, and strange buses that take people to places called the Social Media Clubhouse, there are three or four possible sessions a day. Each day at 2pm, a keynote speaker fills a huge space for an hour. I heard danah boyd (social media anthropologist), Valerie Casey (Designers Accord author), and Evan Williams (Twitter founder) speak.

The measure of success of a session or keynote is the retention of an audience. If it starts to get dull, a presenter’s ego fills the room, or the session’s content doesn’t match the description, people move. They left Evan Williams session in droves after it was dubbed as a dull disaster on par with the Facebook CEO’s interview style keynote of 2008.  There are high expectations to challenge the intelligent designers, artists, information architects, and digital entrepreneurs, and this not an easy crowd. danah boyd has been addressing the backchannel ever since the debacle at her remarks at the Web 2.0 Expo, but the audience seemed rapt with her message about privacy (I know I was).

So as a librarian, here are authors and sessions about books I loved:

Other highlights… I traveled with my beautiful foodie friend so gourmet food from a truck, watching people play foursquare (with chalk and a ball), and giving the developer of Google Wave some feedback. It was an incredibly well-done conference. Now, if only there were more than a dozen librarians in attendance….

Meg Canada (@megcanada) is a frequent guest, and now contributor, to Minnov8. Meg is a senior librarian for Web Services and Training at Hennepin County Library and currently coordinates public training and social media efforts for the library. She volunteers helping with the Unsummit, recently presented at MinneWebCon, and is a regular contributor to Social Media Breakfast.