SXSW Sydney aims high but strays far from its Austin roots
It's the first time the creative festival has been held outside of Texas, but the event held in Sydney held little resemblance to the original.
When SXSW Sydney attendees were navigating the long corridors of the International Convention Centre, where the event was held, more than just a few were relying on an online spreadsheet to find the sessions they wanted to attend.
Skip Capital’s Liv Grivas did SXSW Sydney a “community service” according to one VC when she created a Google Sheet containing all the sessions at the conference. It’s not that an official app didn’t exist - it did - but it was barely usable. It didn’t contain all the sessions that were on, and required you to create a profile to log in. And even if you had a profile, sometimes logging in didn’t even work.
Grivas tweeted that she made the doc (which we can only assume took a fair whack of time to create) because the official app’s “UX was killing me.”
That an old school Google sheet might be more handy than a custom built app for one of the world’s leading innovation conferences was perhaps more poetic than a redline failure on the organisation’s part. After all, SXSW Austin started in the 80s as a grassroots initiative that had humble ambitions to shine a light on creatives, music, art and ideas.
