On Monday, the SXSW “Panel Picker” re-opened online, beginning the long process of selecting panels for the 2012 conference in Austin, Texas. For those of you not familiar with the idea, the panel picker is rooted in good old-fashioned crowdsourcing: empowering the community to shape the structure of the conference by voting on their favorite panels.
That said, they curate the process by ensuring the community only accounts for a portion of the scheduling. According to the SXSW website:
SXSW is a community-driven event. So, knowing what kinds of topics you want to hear at the event next March is extremely important to us. Your votes and comments account for about 30% of the decision-making process for any given programming slot.
Also important is the input of the SXSW Advisory Board, which is a group of industry professionals from across the US and around the world. The final part of the panel decision-making equation is the input of the SXSW staff.
By controlling the quality of the panels chosen through the staff vote and advisory board, they avoid the entire thing becoming nothing more than a popularity contest—which, in the social media world especially, is not hard to envision. Without a doubt, social media “celebrities” dominate the panel picker votes, driving their vast following online to support their own panel or panels they are speaking on. The advisory board helps keep this from getting out of hand.
So far so good. But if they’ve managed to curate the process and avoid a popularity contest, then why our negative headline on this post? Because they’re crowdsourcing the wrong thing.
We talked to expert communicator and SXSW veteran Geoff Livingston (@geoffliving) to get his thoughts on the process. He agreed that the curated process was good for avoiding popularity contests. But when questioned about what was really pulling people to SXSW, his answer was firm: “The networking is the draw, absolutely.”
So why spend so much time picking panels that few people care about? And not only that, but also picking panels that, while somewhat curated, don’t always allow the smartest people to rise to the top. After all, 30% is a hefty weight given to the crowd and the loudest people do not always equal the smartest people.
We propose a tweak for 2013: don’t crowdsource the panels themselves, crowdsource the topics. Eliminate the names from the equation, and let people vote on what they want to learn, not who they want to learn it from.
Not only does that eliminate the chance of a popularity contest, but it means the panels will—finally—provide value for attendees. Sure, most people will still probably go mainly for the networking. But if there’s a way of really leveraging this crowd to make the conference better, SXSW should take advantage of it.
How would they eliminate the self promotion then? Most people (as we know) get on every social network and say “hey vote for my panel”…even if they took names off the panel picker site, people would still know if their proposed session was in there based on its title. There’d have to be a lot of scrubbing of panel picker to make it truly anon.
I think my issue is that the conference has started to cater to one level of proficiency. Tracks, or simply a networking-only badge, with focused topical networking rooms would probably get more to the point. People usually, after their first year, go with a very specific idea of what they want to get out of it, and I think the organizers are missing out on a chance to bring major groups of like-minded people together by having everything so spread out (literally and figuratively).
I think what I had in mind was that they wouldn’t necessarily be voting on panels at all–it would be more like proposed topics. Then users would vote on the topics they want to learn about.
Separately, perhaps, individuals could apply to speak and then get chosen by the advisory board and SXSW staff.
Great observation though–topical networking rooms would be a great way of making it easy for people to meet the people they want to meet. That said, you also don’t want to create too much groupthink, so having a more diverse area is good, too. All about balance. :)
Thanks for the comment!
I like where your heads at on this Alex. I do think a portion of the topics could/should be Crowdsourced, would be a nice twist and drum up topics folks care about … I wouldn’t do this full throttle, as in 100% crowd topics because as Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” … but I like the notion.
Agreed (and that’s a great quote!). The curated approach is a good one, regardless of *what* is actually being crowdsourced.
Maybe even start with a set of core, essential topics, and then let the crowd submit / vote on subtopics and additional ideas.
I don’t think voting on topics separate of knowing who would be speaking would be at all helpful. In my limited experience at SXSW, I’ve observed that most panels are utterly lame because most of the folks who are presenting have no experience (or ability) to offer useful, educational material. There are tweets and comments from thousands of people who say the same thing.
So, it wouldn’t really matter if we voted on interesting topics when they could still be “taught” by uninteresting people. In general, crowdsourcing panels isn’t the best way to ensure quality content.
Hey Carri, thanks for the comment!
We totally agree–just crowdsourcing panels isn’t the best way to ensure quality content. That’s why we like the curated side of things with the SXSW system (much like the GeniusRocket model), where the advisory board and SXSW staff have a say in which panels are chosen.
My thinking is that if we let users vote on the topics, then the advisory board and staff could do the heavy lifting on choosing the most qualified speakers for each topic. I’m sure it wouldn’t be perfect, but it might be a step in the right direction.