The reknowned SXSW Interactive Festival uses crowd-sourcing to sort through their speaker submissions. They publish all their submissions in an interactive ‘panel picker’ and encourage the public to vote on the talks they want to see.
As you can see by the pie chart on this page, the voting is worth 30% of the total selection process.
On Twitter, Boris suggested that we ought to organize a Vancouver ‘vote for my panel, I’ll vote for yours’ squad of voting keeners. So, here it is. Leave your panel names and URLs in the comments, and I’ll add them to the bulleted list below. Vote for the ones that sound good, the people you like, or just randomly until you come down off the drugs.
- How a Brand Grows From Notion to Product – Panelists are Todd, Larry, Cindy and me.
UPDATE: Er, hang on, Dave beat me to it with an enormous post. If you don’t see your panel over there, feel free to add it both places.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
How long can a blog post be? It’s like a Zen koan with no answer … in this case quite long 😉 but yes, please add your panel and i’ll cast my vote as part of the cartel.
I don’t get how gaming a process that is meant to get consensus on what people are genuinely interested in helps.
bz: I quote from the SXSW Interactive announcement about voting being open:
“We encourage you to tell your business associates and friends to vote for your idea(s) on the Panel Picker. Absolutely anyone can get involved in this process — sign-up is quick, easy and free.”
Plus, of course, everybody does it. If you’re not a household name and don’t ‘game the process’, your odds of being accepted are, I’d imagine, signficantly reduced.
I’m guilty as charged as well, asking people to vote In Georgia Straight and TV Week Polls.. but those are frivolous.
I would have thought the purpose of having a panel poll would be to legitimately gauge interest. Guess not.
The other factor is that they received 1229 proposals, so people pointing to particular panels is probably a useful filtering mechanism.
since i am here ;-), here’s my pitches:
Social Media for Social Change (with panelists) and F@ck Stats, Make Art – a presentation as seen at Northern Voice 2008
DB: you got to give some love to your friends at the Lpb who pitched Micromafia: Building a Local Small Business Support Network — http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1480