SXSW 2009 is approaching fast, and around this time, potential presenters collect their thoughts and come up with panels that would make for interesting discussion during the day. In true democratic fashion, the (registered) public votes on submitted panel ideas through the Interactive Panel Picker. Each panel idea falls under one category. The focus for this post will be Community/Social Networks.
It wouldn’t be Web 2.0 if you didn’t build a site that didn’t have some sort of social networking around it. While many people have applied James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds and built pretty nifty applications around networks of supposedly different types of people, few have found ways to monetize their communities. Few have also figured out how to effectively manage content that these communities have generated.
Most of the panels sound about the same, but here are several that I’ve picked out:
- Working Alone Sucks: Join the Coworking Revolution with Independents Hall’s Alex Hillman
- Content Theft and Copyright Infringement on Your Online Community with iFroggy Network’s Patrick O’Keefe
- Data Portability - The Next Step in Unifying Communication with Social Gaming Network’s Shervin Pishevar
- Is Spec Work Evil? The Online Creative Community Speaks with crowdSPRING’s Mike Samson
Last, but certainly not least, I wanted to call out a panel submission from my colleague, John Eckman of Optaros: Managing User Generated Content. An experienced and accomplished speaker, John has presented this topic before at the Web Content 2008 conference. He’s also promoting his other proposed panels, which you can find here.