Re: Semantic Web panels at SXSW 2010 conference

On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Juan Sequeda <juanfederico@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Everybody
>
> I don't know if many know about SXSW conference, but it is the huge
> festival on interactive, film and music. The interactive part can be
> considered a big web developer conference. This past SXSW, I was amazed that
> there weren't panels on Semantic Web related stuff. So last month, I decided
> to get in contact with several people in the community and ask them to
> submit as many panels as possible. We were able to submit 12 panels! There
> are also 7 other related panels that were not submitted by us. The issue is
> that panels are choosen in part by a public vote. So now I urge the whole
> semantic web community to help out and vote for these panels! With Semantic
> Web Austin, we want to lobby with the organizers of SXSW to have a special
> semantic web track (a full day on semantic web panels). But for this to
> happen, we need to show them that there is enough interest.
>
> I made a list of the submitted panels here:
> http://juansequeda.blogspot.com/2009/08/semantic-web-panels-at-sxsw-2010.html
>
> Finally I want to thank Ian Davis, Andraz Tori, Tom Heath, Leigh Dodds and
> Peter Mika for helping out and submitting panels!
>

Thanks Juan and everyone for taking the initiative here. It'd be great to
see more engagement with the SXSW scene from SemWebbers. Hope to be able to
make the trip this year!

BTW I did comment on one of the panels (via the voting site,
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/4496?return=%2Fideas%2Findex%2Finteractive%2Fq%3Asemantic)
that it was un-necessarily confrontational, in terms of painting the
RDFa/microformats/microdata situation as a "war". This sort of framing is
always a temptation when arranging a panel since organizers tend to prefer a
lively (ie. confrontational) panel to one in which everyone collaboratively
agrees. Personally I'd rather see a bit more of the latter :)

cheers,

Dan