Vote for our SXSWi panel suggestions

Made by Many has an opportunity — actually, three — to host panel discussions at South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March 2011, but we need your votes to make it happen.

We attended SXSWi 2010 en masse and absolutely loved it — the people, the networking, the keynotes, the panels and the tequila. By bringing together a huge number of creative, freakishly intelligent people SXSWi acts as a sort of ideas incubator for our industry.

The sessions delegates attend set the tone of the year to come: they raise the issues we talk about and tease out the problems we try to solve. The best sessions kick off conversations that lead to technical innovations, new ways of working, unexpected collaborations and all kinds of general awesomeness. Hosting a panel discussion is an opportunity to start some of those conversations.

Here are the things we want to talk about

Good News: Apps, Paywalls, Publishers and Content

News organizations and publishers are walking backwards into the future carrying the cultural and business baggage of 200 years of mass media. Most will die; new models will arise. In the next half decade we expect a wholesale change in the way news is produced and consumed and by the end of this period we’ll know the answer to the question: “If we had never had mass media, what would journalism look like today?” A panel of individuals involved in news innovation looks at the issue from all sides and plots a path from old to new models of sharing what we need to know.

Daddy, You Should Tweet That: Parenting Goes Digital

The parenting web is on fire, with more parents tweeting and more family sites and services launching every month. Social media is fast becoming a huge part of modern parenting, but to what end? Is it here to wreck or revolutionize family time? Is there money to be made in this market, or are savvy parents marketing-proof? A panel of agencies and service designers will explore a series of projects to identify mistakes made, lessons learned, and future directions for the parenting web.

The Last of the Launch-and-Leave ‘Ems

Negotiating the new handover. Agencies are building fewer static campaign-oriented sites and more platforms, communities and services. Cutting the apron strings between agency and digital product immediately after launch doesn’t make practical sense, but maintaining the relationship indefinitely is costly for the client and creatively stifling for the agency. This panel will explore solutions that are most likely to be beneficial to both parties as well as the members of the service they are trying to build: a new plan for launch, propagation and perpetuation.

Your vote will get us to the next round

All of these panels are in the panel picker right now, just waiting for you to register or sign in (free! easy!) and vote for them. If you think these things are worth talking about, please spread the word and rally the troops to make it so. Please also use the comment space on this post or on the panelpicker to share any ideas or links that you think would make these sessions more valuable.