Austin Way Magazine - GreenGale Publishing - There is a place beyond the crowds, beyond the ropes, where dreams are realized and success is celebrated. You are invited.
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/461140
think Austin is still a great place, a very creative place. And for every one of those quirky businesses that becomes a casualty of growth, there are two or three quirky businesses that pop up somewhere else with the new generation of Austin." SXSW has experienced a remarkably similar dynamic. Listen to any longtime attendee, and there's a good chance he or she will tell stories of the glory days and lament the conference's size today and the inf luence of major corporations. Forrest is not blind to this, and as with the city's development, he's come to accept it as a necessary change. "There is a degree of churn to the event," he says. "People who have been attending for two or three years, they'll say, 'I don't need to go to Austin this year.' And that's always kind of a bummer to hear, but if it were the exact same people attending every year, it would be like a high- school reunion—it just gets boring after a while." This is not to say that churn and change aren't issues that require a lot of active management. "The strength of Interactive is that we have so many different things going on; it's absolute sensory overload," Forrest says. "At the same time, the weakness is that you have so many things going on that it's absolute sensory overload, and that can make it hard for anyone to understand where they should be going, what they're missing, and how it all works." The new subject-area tracks are one strategy SXSW has used to help people navigate the chaos. At the same time, Forrest argues that getting the most out of the conference requires being open to serendipity and having a willingness to explore the unknown. "One of the things we encourage people not to do is to go to sessions they know a lot about. Go to something you don't know anything about; make a new connection." But besides managing the sheer scale of SXSW Interactive, the bigger issue is managing the growing cost of it. Not only has the price of a registration badge increased, but hotel rooms, Airbnb rentals, and airfares usually soar in early March. To some extent, that's a function of one of the hall- marks of the conference's success: the presence of larger brands, not just the Googles and Twitters of the world but also Subway and Oreo. "The irony is that these corporate people are coming here, and they can afford the higher prices, so they are essentially helping drive up the prices for everyone, and that can drive out the very people they want to connect with"—the young, upstart innovators. To continue drawing new faces and thinkers and the next wave of start-up founders, the conference is establishing schol- arship programs with leading universities, including Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. Similarly, there's been a big push to sign up a more diverse crowd of speakers, including three keynotes by women this year, the most ever, in hopes of draw- ing more diverse attendees. Ultimately the goal of the conference is for people to find their own ideal mix of business and pleasure, drinking and learning, order and chaos. And that's what keeps Forrest, in his 21st year on the job, motivated. "The most rewarding part of it all is hearing from people who have been to the event who say it had some kind of impact on them. They got a new job because of SXSW, married someone they met here, or started a business with someone. It's neat to think you can have that kind of impact on people." AW "I thInk If you poll most attendees, they'd say they don't want It to get any bIgger. It's bIg enough." —hugh forrest Some of the most popular events of SXSW are the free concerts, open to everyone, at Auditorium Shores. The shows feature bands like Bajofondo, shown here in 2013. Band of Skulls performs at SXSW Music, which overlaps with SXSW Interactive for one day. SXSW Interactive created SXnotes, a joint effort with ImageThink, to design a new way to share sketchnotes and visualizations from SXSW keynote speakers. 86 AUSTINWAY.com