I had a great time at South by Southwest last spring, and I’m very excited about attending again next March. This year, I even submitted a proposal called “All About Audience: Improving User Experience”. The event organizers have posted my submission (along with over 2,000 other proposals) to the Panel Picker at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com. The idea is for the community at large to vote (simple thumbs-up YES or thumbs-down NO) to indicate which are likely to be the most popular sessions. The program team will then use the results of the vote as input into the selection procedure.

You don’t have to attend SXSW to vote, but you do have to register at the panel-picker website (it only takes a few seconds). Once at the panel picker site, you can search by submitter name, or topic, or category, or keyword – it’s mostly pretty easy to navigate.

While I hope to get lots of votes (please vote YES for me!) I would also love to see lots of my colleagues from STC and other organizations bring the importance of technical communication to this potentially huge audience. I’m definitely voting YES for the following sessions:

Brenda Huettner (All About Audience: Improving User Experience)
John Hedtke (Co-Authoring without Homicide)
Karen Bachmann (Strategic User Experience: Not Just for Products Anymore)
Alan Porter (Wikis are Wonderful – Or Are They? AND Spandex and Software: Can Comics Get You to Read the Manual?)
Charlene Kingston (Reach Your Diverse Audience with a Persona Strategy AND Designing Products that Change User Behavior)
Sarah O’Keefe (Will User-Generated Content Wipe Out Technical Writers?)
Rahel Bailie (Greening Your Content)

Got other suggestions for me? Put them in the comments, below.

And make sure to vote!