sxsw | Social Signal

Go directly to the latest Open SoSi release, How to create budget estimates for proposals and project management. >>

I'm hosting a conversation today at SXSW, Breaking it Open: Open Source Consulting Models. So this seemed like the right moment to return to the job of open sourcing our consulting materials.

As it turns out, the biggest challenge of open sourcing is actually organizing our materials in a form that is useful to share. Any programmer can tell you that documentation is often the most onerous part of sharing code, and we've found the same thing is true in our own open sourcing process. We could just dump a pile of documents onto the Internet, but we want to release them in a form other people can make sense of and apply to their own work. That takes time.

The panel picker for next year's South By Southwest Interactive conference has just gone live, and zowee! there are some great choices. We're especially thrilled to see so many great social media panels proposed by interesting women speakers, promising a SXSW in which we get to hear some sopranos and altos mixed in with the basses and baritones that dominate so many tech events.

Here are some of the women panelists we're excited about (in no particular order). Some of them are women who have dazzled us at past events; others are new discoveries we made while digging through the wealth of awesome-sounding panel proposals.