Friends, Robbi and I have applied to speak at next year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin.
If you’re not familiar, SXSW is a huge group celebration of film, music, and emerging technologies, with related conferences in education and environmental issues. SXSW is a big deal and it would be great for us to be chosen to speak.
Which is why we need your help! But more on that in a minute.
Building a proposal centered around the TEDx talk we delivered last spring, Robbi and I have put together a two-hour workshop on collaboration and have pitched it to both the SXSWinteractive and SXSWedu conferences.
The interactive proposal is just Robbi and me, and the edu proposal also involves our friend, the nonfiction writer Joshua Wolf Shenk, who has spent the past five years researching and writing about collaboration (his findings culminating in the recently-published Powers of Two).
SXSW speakers are selected via a competitive, juried process, but 30 percent of the decision comes down to public voting, so if you are willing, we would really appreciate it if you would go to the SXSW Panel Picker site, register, and cast votes for both of our proposals.
Here’s what to do:
1) Create a SXSW account.
2) Check your email to confirm the account.
3) Click here and enter your login info.
4) Click here to cast your vote for our SXSW edu panel (Click the thumbs up icon to vote yes. It will turn green once you’ve done it).
5) Click here to cast your vote for our SXSW interactive panel.
6) Congratulate yourself for being such a thoughtful, kind, and patient, friend and supporter of us.
Many thanks in advance for helping us out with this. It should take less than two minutes to do (unless you’re Robbi’s dad, in which case it may take two hours), and it could make a huge difference for us.
To give you a taste of the sort of thing we’ll be talking about, here is our TEDx talk from last spring.
Happy Panel Picking!
Done!
(How many times may I vote?)
Hello, Jenifer,
You may only vote once. The exception being, if you created a separate login, in which case you could vote again. But we’re not going to ask people to do that! All we ask is your one vote. If we add everyone’s one vote up, hopefully we’ll have enough of a pile to make this thing happen!
Thanks so much for doing it,
Matthew
Done and Done! We would vote for y’all every day and twice on Sunday. Any helpful suggestions for comments other than “Because the Idiots kick a$$” that might add weight to the vote would be welcome.
Austin! I shall resume my campaign to get you guys to visit — b/c the odds of me getting my sorry self to Kent County anytime soon are slim dude. Slim.
Also: margaritas, queso, and good timez are promised.
Heather: As far as I am concerned, ll timez involving queso are good.
Michele: Thank you for your enthusiasm! May your vote be felt doubly by the powers that be.
ya. I voted too. No need to thank me.
I tarry here to note that you do *not* come up if one lazily types “collaboration idiots” into SXSW’s search engine.
However, you do come up tippity-toppity on just the “collaboration”, without so much the “idiots”. Probably better PR-wise.
Amy: Thank you, dammit.
It’s also good to know that we are the only ones interested in collaboration at SXSW. Hopefully this will work in our favor?
Also: Thanks!
Done, and thanks for spelling it out. Be grateful that Bob has you trained for folks like me … it only means more votes. Fingers crossed for you guys!
done! Good luck.
Clare:
To his credit, Bob has trained me for many other things as well, including the fine points of proper grammar, a thing I seemed to have missed growing up, and even during my four years as an English major. Also, seeing that I am the Bob figure in Robbi’s and my reenactment of her parents’ wild, entrepreneurial life, Bob has taught me to overpack when preparing for book fairs (in Bob’s case, it was pottery). For his tendency to overprepare and overestimate in all things, Bob earned the nickname OK Bob (overkill Bob). I suspect that Robbi will start calling me OK Matthew one of these days.
And proud I will be.