Well, I made it through volunteering for my first SXSW. I was on the conference tech crew for the interactive festival. What this really means: I sat in the room for the panels and made sure that the presenters could hook their laptops up to the projector (when it’s a mac, we sometimes need to call in the Dongle Squad), and that the levels were good on the sound board. It was nice to get to sit in on the talks; I saw some cool new concepts and heard a few thought-provoking arguments.
Since I’d never volunteered for SXSW before, I had no idea what to expect. Being new to Austin, I’m still looking for a job and figured that this would be something fun to do while I’m looking. And in fact, it turned into a positive couple of connections — I connected with some folks to work on a contract job, and met some other people who I’ve since hung out with. Very cool.
What would I change, if it were up to me?
More awareness of available shifts, ahead of time.
It probably just takes having done it once to know what’s going on, but it would have been nice to know that I could have logged some hours ahead of time to ‘bank’ them. For example, some guys spent a few hours making some RJ45 patch cables.
What I would have like to have known ahead of time: I had no idea that I would get six hours’ credit for bag stuffing (though it only took about three) or that I could have helped with shifts on some of the logistics crews, ahead of time, to grab a few hours as well. I also learned that shift leaders are credited with “time and a half” hours (1.5 x) which is why most of them had platinum badges. Lessons for next time.
The way it turned out, I was going for a gold badge (interactive + film), but that meant I was missing out on some of the panels I wanted to hear if I didn’t get to work in that room during the panel. “Oh well, I should have bought the badge.” Meaning, of course, be happy with what you’re given! My shift leaders were very nice and let me ask for specific placements, and arranged things so rooms were covered if I wanted to go grab a keynote or whatever. Once or twice I missed something I wanted to see, but as things turned out it was good that they put me where they did.
More training, ahead of time.
I was nervous and ended up sending email to the organizers, asking them if I had missed any messages from them. Nope, I was told, we’ll just do training before the first round of panels, day-of, and do subsequent follow-ups each morning. It’s understandable that you wouldn’t necessarily have access to the rooms in the conference center or the Hilton ahead of time, and that it costs money to rent this stuff. In spite of that, I think that it would still be possible to set up something ahead of time just to give people more of a clue. Done properly (oh man, I’m envisioning role playing here) it could actually be a really funny way to make people aware of some of the situations they might face.
More sound board training.
On the one hand you have people saying, “Okay, for the most part, don’t touch anything except this one fader.” (Which is the Master volume.) I can understand why we tell this to some interactive conference tech volunteers. There are a lot of knobs and buttons, most of which do not need to be touched. And there is a podcast crew running around making sure they’re getting good levels from each of the panels, so they might make adjustments to the board.
On the other hand, the podcast people don’t stick around. They don’t work with the panelists. They don’t have to shove the mic right in their face, in case they don’t project enough… or deal with it when the panelists lean away or push the mic away because they think they’re being too loud. $$%#^#^%$. Or when they need a lav mic because we don’t have enough desk mics, and they’re in the wrong place or just not picking up the sound properly… Then it’s Q&A time, and who needs to remind folks to step up to the mic to ask their question, or hassle the panelists to paraphrase questions from folks in the audience who didn’t step up to the mic?
So: I can ride gain, or adjust individual channels’ levels. I know where the levels should be, but I don’t think that some other folks on our crew had any idea about these issues. This results in bad podcasts. (I just listened to a few of them.) These guys are trying to post podcasts the next day. Odds are very slim they’re going to try and pick through the podcast to find the place where they need to amplify someone’s question, asked off-mic, to bring it up to listenable levels.
Video as podcast / Video as image magnification
Some of the people walking around with cameras (again, another crew – not much interaction – why?) needed a line out from the sound board, not a big deal. They came with the adaptors they needed. But then I saw two guys show up with cameras and only one of them is taking the sound from the board. And they don’t do the flash trick or any kind of sync — so how easy will it be for the poor guy at the editing suite to sync feeds from multiple cameras? (Given the turnaround time, what do you want to bet that even happens at all?)
During some of the keynotes, image magnification could have been done a bit better. They send one guy with one camera to cover the Nate Silver talk (full house in Ballroom A, overflow seating in ballrooms B and C. HUGE crowds here) and he’s panning back and forth between the two of them. I was getting seasick. Send two cameras to that, throw a simple and cheap video switcher in between them. If you want to get really fancy, put intercom headsets on both camera people and cut to B while you tell A to reframe the shot.
Meanwhile, folks in the B and C ballrooms were having an even worse time of it; not only do they not have folks up in front to look at and use as a reference, but they’re getting the sound and the video very far apart. Again, there are tools for fixing this and I’m surprised that Freeman / AVS didn’t provide any – but I’m sure it was made worse by the choice of cameras being used for image magnification.
Better issue tracking and coordination / Putting resources in the right place / Having a very good understanding of what we’re allowed to give panelists
We had a few frustrating things happen during one panel. These guys (Paul Boag and co from Boagworld) wanted to do a live podcast. They said they’d mentioned it to the guy in charge of tech (probably meaning the guy running Interactive, whose name is Hugh, I think) but mysteriously this never made it down the chain to us. They also brought the right audio adapters that they needed, to come out of the sound board.
Sadly, the problem was, in this location the board was at the very back of the room (why, I have no idea) and they wanted a hard wired ethernet drop, which was only up at the front of the room. We set up a dedicated laptop with a sound feed coming from the board at the back of the room (where it should have been), didn’t have the hard-wired ethernet cable and didn’t want to risk the wireless (which probably would have been just fine, TBH). So they pulled it and sacrificed an audio generation for a hard-wired ethernet feed. (Meaning they got the audio source for their live podcast out of the PA speakers next to them. Ouch.)
This also took place at the Hilton, which was one of the farthest locations from the tech ‘home base.’ And our chosen mode of communication looked like this:
- I’m on the front line. If I have an issue, I tell my shift leader.
- My shift leader sends a text message to a repeater service being used by tech crew. There is no guarantee as to how fast it will make it to the rest of the team.
- Someone else on the shift leaders/crew chiefs pool who is closer to the tech home base goes off to find the guy who has access to the resources we need.
- That guy shows up with a 60 foot ethernet cable, apologetic and out of breath (we’re geeks, not marathon runners, after all) but he’s too late and we’ve already gone with (a really lousy) Plan B.
To finish things off: As a result of this situation, the panelists ask us if they’re going to be able to get a clean recording of this panel from the podcasting crew, since they’re digitally recording it off of the board. So we say we’ll ask the guy when he comes back. The podcasting guy is pretty tired (this panel went late, until 7 pm or so) so we’re trying to be really nice to him. He tells us that all media recorded is property of SXSW and these guys will have to talk to his boss to get it cleared and etc, etc. This, of course, frustrates the panelists (who themselves are podcasters) because they’ve promised their audience that they’ll have a nice clean version of the audio up on their site by such-and-such date.
I have no idea how it worked out, but hope it all turned out well.
Having better laptops (bring back Macs!)
I don’t know what the deal is, but if this is all donation/sponsorship stuff then it’s sort of backfiring. Apparently last year and this year are the first time that SXSW hasn’t had Apple laptops on hand as spares. Instead they have a bunch of Dells. We went through and made sure that Firefox, Chrome, and a bunch of other apps were installed on them.
However, based on what I saw, almost 85-90% of all panelists brought Apple laptops to present with. And if their personal machine was having problems, or if they forgot their adapter dongle (common mistake!) then we still needed to have those mac-compatible things on hand… because odds are, they did their presentation in Keynote. This means an extra step of exporting their presentation as a powerpoint file, losing some of their transitions/effects, etc.
Alex Bogusky (of Crispin Porter Bogusky) did a panel on shared bike programs. (Neat idea, but tell them to wear a helmet, please?) He just shows up (with maybe 10 minutes before he goes on) with a USB stick. Sorry, but not a smart idea. The memory stick should be the fallback, not the primary. So we copy his presentation to the Dell laptop and ask him if there’s any special audio or video stuff. He says he’s got one video but don’t worry about it.
Of course, during his presentation, he talks up this video he’s about to show, and not only does it not work (oops, guess we should have made QuickTime part of our standard install — and it doesn’t always work the same way on Windows anyway) but it pops up one of those irritating repeating dialog boxes. So he looks like a jackass in front of his audience and some guy makes a crack about, “Want to borrow my Mac?”
What we could have done better: Point is, we could have been better prepared (quicktime), but so could he (bring your own laptop, bring a mac in fact, show up earlier.) And while we’re at it: Get the heck out of the room and take all of your groupies with you in a reasonable amount of time — either there’s going to be another panel in the room within the next half hour, or it’s the end of the day and all of us (unpaid) volunteers would really like you to leave, so we can leave and lock up the equipment.
And frankly, I don’t know what Dell is doing for SXSW — please bear in mind, my opinions are solely my own and I am in no way speaking on behalf of SXSW — I know they’re a local hometown computer company and all, but their products are just looking bad. Either they sit up there unused, or they get used and they fail and make everyone mad. How is this working? Meanwhile, Apple is making the laptops that most of the presenters are using anyway, and SXSW ends up looking bad because we aren’t supporting them well enough.
More Dongles!
As I mentioned already, most presenters have Mac laptops, and there are many adapter dongles. They didn’t always bring those. We had a collection of them on hand, but not always the right ones. I’d say we had 80% coverage, which was not bad. But we had to spread those between 20 simultaneous conference rooms in four main areas, which was still too much of a stretch.
SXSW Accelerator / Platinum Track
I got asked to sit in on both of these events. Both of them were new, so nobody knew what to expect. They were already staffed by AVS / Freeman guys, so we were just there to help out.
In Accelerator, the job was to make sure that the laptops being used to give these two minute pitches were outputting the proper signal (1024 x 768 @ 60 hz) for the video switching equipment.
In some cases we also had to work with the sound guy, Jamie, and make sure that the laptops were sending good levels out to his board (on a preview bus) before they went ‘live’. The pace was: sprint to get everyone set up during a changeover, then sit there for a long fricking time in between these pitches. Some of them were very good ideas. Others were horrible. Listening to Guy Kawasaki commenting on them was pretty fun.
What we could have done better: The kid from Freeman who was in charge of video switching pointed out that all of the audio and video equipment was being fed by one circuit. And all of the laptops being used to give the presentations. Which meant that he didn’t want us plugging in our laptops while we were there. Frankly, I think he was just overreacting a little bit, but he had a good point. There probably should have been more than one circuit to put the equipment on.
During Platinum Track, most of the panels went fine. I didn’t realize why turnout was so low (typically 30-50% of the room’s capacity) until I re-read the description: Only Platinum badge-holders were even allowed in. Sorry, but that seems kind of lame. If someone pays for Interactive, they should be allowed to see all of Interactive. Hopefully this policy doesn’t bite them in the butt.
Anyway, I got to help out an award-winning composer, who gave us a sneak peek at the new movie that he had just scored; that was nice, but he showed up in the beginning and wanted to see/hear his stuff, up until five minutes before the first panelist was supposed to go on stage (and his own talk wasn’t until that afternoon.) I ended up using my personal machine to play back his DVD, again because of issues with the Dell laptop… good thing I brought it with me.
Lights!
The lighting controls in the rooms were an issue at times, both in the Convention Center and in the Hilton. At one point, the lights kept going down in the room but we weren’t touching them. Turns out that a cleaning guy in another room had turned the lights down after finishing cleaning up — and the rooms’ controls were ganged together. So we were fighting with him for control of the lights until I ran in there to tell him to knock it off.
Other times, the panels should have been ganged but weren’t meaning that volunteers had to run between two sets of controls to adjust lighting in ‘connected’ rooms.
I’m sure there were a couple more tech issues that we could have dealt with better, but I think those were the biggies. Besides, this post is already way too long.