SXSW ’17 in the rear view: What worked, what didn’t

It’s hard to keep a consistent scorecard for South by Southwest because everyone’s SXSW experience is so different and personal.

You make a schedule and adhere to it as much or as little as you care to and then the adventure begins. The unpredictability of what you’ll experience and how different it will be from everyone else is a major feature, not a bug. So rating it on any kind of scale is to grade it through a lens of one’s own stamina, openness and, frankly, a willingness to stand in line and battle impatience like an anxious kid at Disney World who’s staying up for the fireworks.

Which is to say that this list of things that worked and didn’t work at South by Southwest 2017 is subjective. But it is based not just on my days on the ground at SXSW, but also on conversations with other conference-goers and the gist I got from other writers, tweets and crowd reactions around SXSW.

The good

Politics: There’s no avoiding the politics in the air, and rather than keep the tech content at SXSW apolitical this year, SXSW instead leaned into local, state, national and international political debates, a strategy that seemed to work well and reflect the broader culture.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who was at SXSW to talk about cancer, not politics, nevertheless drew a packed house and he was named Speaker of the Event at the SXSW Innovation Awards. I heard good buzz from attendees about talks by U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.; CNN’s Van Jones; and Jessica Shortall, managing director of the Texas Competes advocacy group.

While some SXSW attendees said they came to get away from politics, many others seemed fully engaged. Tech Under Trump panels I went to during the seeming gray area between SXSW Music and most of the tech/Interactive content, drew more than 50 people per session, sometimes more. People clearly wanted to hear about and discuss politics and SXSW provided plenty of that content.

Gaming: Last year, I expressed concerns that moving SXSW Gaming to the Austin Convention Center and scheduling it during the second SXSW weekend might keep away families and drop attendance. That didn’t happen; in fact, SXSW Gaming seemed to thrive in its second year with the Convention Center as its home, so much so that the event required a paid wristband for those older than 12. The SXSW Gaming Awards were only able to fill about half of the Hilton Downtown Austin Grand Ballroom on Saturday night, but Twitch was live-streaming the ceremony for those who couldn’t make it.

Lots of content: This was the first year in a very long time that I didn’t go panel-by-panel through the SXSW schedule, carefully crafting a schedule that I would consult all week. Instead, I focused on keynotes and featured speakers along with my colleagues and figured I’d tackle things day by day and be more open to check out things I was hearing about versus over scheduling.

That strategy worked out pretty well; three of my favorite things this year, including a giant cardboard box on people’s heads, the “Optic Obscura” art installation and a “Mummy” VR experience, were things I hadn’t planned to see before SXSW started. That went for Tech Under Trump panels and all the panels you could see about VR, space exploration, machine learning, not to mention all the unofficial mini-conferences with their own sets of panels outside SXSW. If you were bored, you weren’t looking around enough.

Glimpses of the future: I wasn’t as impressed with the virtual reality stuff I saw this year (“The Mummy Zero-Gravity VR Experience” was interesting, but not something you’re going to install in your living room), and the Expo Hall floor was less inspiring than I was hoping. But every now and then, such as with a set of vibrating speakers that sounded amazing in the Expo Hall, or with some of the winners from the Innovation Awards, I got that little buzz in the back of my skull that tells me I’m catching a glimpse of where our technology is going. There were also lots of robots at SXSW; not just the kind that live in your Amazon-branded speaker, but physical ones that were fascinating and creepy.

The not-so-good

Chaos in the lines: The biggest complaint I heard from attendees, one that seemed to apply to music and film as well as tech attendees, was that lines were more disorganized than in previous years and that this year’s change to a primary/secondary access system created lots of confusion and bad vibes.

Add to that a new policy to cut back on allowing full panels to accept more people in as audience members are leaving and a rule against standing in the back of panel rooms — and it meant volunteers had to do a lot more seating enforcement for 2017. This is part of a bigger move toward converging the Film/Music/Interactive legs of SXSW, but in execution it wasn’t communicated to attendees what exactly these changes meant for the day-to-day experience.

In its March 15 daily email to those attending, SXSW acknowledged the problems: “As the Interactive and Film tracks start wrapping up, we’d like to take a moment to acknowledge that we understand that new regulations, new badge access, and our patented SXSW lines have all resulted in some less than satisfactory attendee experiences for some of you. We don’t like that, we don’t want that, and we are always striving to improve. We hope you’ll have patience with us as we grow into these changes. We do listen to feedback and will continue to make SXSW an inclusive, forward-thinking, and unique event,” the email said in part.

Where are the live-streams? I’ve asked repeatedly, but haven’t gotten a great answer for why SXSW organizers decided not to livestream the event’s major talks and keynotes for 2017.

You can make all kinds of guesses about whether streaming stuff online keeps people from buying a badge and attending, but even for a major event such as the Biden talk, SXSW decided not to open the talk to the outside world live. Instead, it posted a video to You-Tube later. As of this writing, there are videos of the major keynotes available free on YouTube and previews of other major panels that will begin posting in full in April, according to SXSW. For the record, SXSW did livestream the SXSW Gaming Awards as it has in years past with Twitch, but why that event and not others? This one’s still a mystery to me.

The SXSW marathon: I’m not made of steel and while I think I’m holding up pretty well for 41, I simply can’t hang with a conference that lasts nine full days, especially one as packed and exhausting as SXSW can be.

The idea that SXSW Interactive (or whatever we’re calling the tech portion after 2017) now stretches to seven full days, with SXSW Gaming taking up three, means no rest and no respite for someone who wants to experience it all. SXSW staffers remind me, whenever I bring this up, that South by Southwest is a marathon, not a sprint. But how many marathon runners do any of us know? And it should be noted that SXSW staffers are super-exhausted by this long run, too. Will compressing the conference to something more manageable be on the table as Tech/Film/Music continue to converge? Your guess is as good as mine.

Abby the bot: I’m not here to badmouth Abby, the virtual assistant/bot that SXSW incorporated into its “SXSW Go” app this year. In fact, I didn’t really get the chance to play around with it too much as I had a lot of my schedule set and wasn’t searching the app for suggestions this year. But given the very few tweets I saw about Abby, it seems to me that a lot of attendees didn’t catch wind that the bot exists. Most of what I heard about Abby came from those in the bot industry or from SXSW itself, not from users who might be delighted or annoyed by Abby.

It could have been a good conversation-starter at SXSW, but this may have just been a case of a lack of awareness. Maybe Abby will return next year and give us the guidance we need for an even better SXSW.

Contact Omar L. Gallaga at 512-445-3672.

Twitter: @omarg