All posts by Lloyd Davis
Day 14
Monday I knew that going badgeless was absolutely the right idea. I'm not feeling the constant worry of being in the wrong place or the wrong panel or being frustrated thinking about panels, going along expecting something interesting and finding the same old drivel.
I hung out with some friends and then had lunch thanks to @kerrymg and her colleague Alex from Mofilm – our waitress, Natalie, gave the best fake British accent I've heard since I've been here – if you're in Austin and you want a waitress who doesn't sound like Dick Van Dyke go to Moonshine and ask for Natalie. By the by, we had a great conversation about the importance of interesting conversation and improvisation.
Then I met up with Breda from LearningPool to make sure we captured the fact that we were wearing our t-shirts 
but also to have a lovely chat, @cittiecait came along too.
but also to have a lovely chat, @cittiecait came along too.I popped over to the Belmont to catch up with @missdd about all sorts, including her move to NYC to get the @1000heads office set up.
I got a #chevysxsw to Whole Foods to grab some real food for once (got one back as well!) these are great, just cars that you can flag down and ask them to go wherever you like – free taxis really.
I went over to the railroad station and found out that I'd misunderstood the timetable and the next stage of my journey won't be exactly as expected. Still don't know how that's going to pan out (except, undoubtedly, for the best)
Back into town, I found @heathr at last and walked and talked and lounged in the Hilton with her while we cemented our Social Artist bonds – really need more of this hanging out with people who get it and are doing it. I also found that tummelling is indeed a very similar concept and that that's what I'm doing too.
I popped into the Northern Ireland party and listened to some tortured stripy-shirted hipsters for a while and then took in a little NO vibe at the Lucky Lounge with @FunkyBigSam but needed to get back fairly early to make sure I could blog about making a decision on the trip to Lafayette.
Day 13
Sunday didn't feel like a Sunday at all.
Daytime was a lot of trying to get to meet people and being frustrated.
I spent the afternoon at a #technomad meetup – lots of very interesting people using social technology to travel in different ways and generally be homeless without being *homeless*.
In the evening, I got more into the swing of it. I had dinner at #globalgrill courtesy of UKTI and got to see @dominiccampbell, @rachelclarke and unexpectedly @rachelcaroe,
then I met with @hotskillet, @ledgedancer & @SidewaysMedia as the result of a tweet from @melindrift,
and I ended up at a #transmedia meetup thanks to @scott_walker and got to meet @skotleach, @jill380 and many others.
Throughout I got the chance to repeat and refine and understand better the stories I have to tell as part of this trip.
Day 12
Saturday was the first day I took my ukulele downtown. I spent a lot of time with Phil – we had lunch with the Bambuser gang, streamed me playing outside the convention centre and went and played again over in the park where another guy was learning the lessons of trying to strum a steel-stringed guitar with your fingers (don't try it at home kids, especially, if like him you're playing someone else's guitar and you're going to have to explain to them why it's covered in your blood)
Otherwise a blur of bumping into people. Here's me and the lovely Jackie Danicki
I also played uke while waiting in line for the Cheezburger party – haven't been so ignored since I last played at Chancery Lane on the Underground 🙂
Money #1
One of the big lessons I learned this year from fundraising is not to rely on *anything* at all until it's in my account. I had a few potential corporate sponsorship deals in the pipeline and I guessed that at least one of them would come through either before or during the trip. None of them did.
I'm hugely grateful of course to all those who've given money, bought me meals and made me so welcome in their homes. However, I need some more help.
For those who don't know me, I have no income from employment in the UK this month or next and I'm about £2,000 ($3,200) short on being able to pay the rest of my bills back at home (my rent falls due in a week's time) and maintain my minimal levels of day-to-day expenses here.
So I'm open to ideas in addition to the following:
There's a donate button on the sidebar of the blog. If you didn't put anything in the pot before the trip and you're getting some value out of what I'm doing, please do consider contributing that way.
I'm still open to support from businesses and organisations who either just would like an association with the trip or, preferably, for whom I can do something useful while I'm here (though SXSWi is over from today). This should give you an idea of all the sorts of things I can do, if you don't already know.
Perhaps you've heard me play ukulele and singing at some point on this trip – how about buying my album on bandcamp? You can pay whatever you think it's worth.
And anything else you can thing of etc.
Solve it while I sleep #4
Getting to Lafayette
I've planned a few days rest near Lafayette LA before moving onto New Orleans – it's a kind of mid-point decompression after SXSW. I'd really like to be there as long as I can – Thursday thru Sunday. I misread the Amtrak timetable and thought I could leave Austin on Wednesday night and get to Lafayette on Thursday. I can't. The next train there leaves on Thursday gets in Friday morning. My lovely hostess in Austin, Sarah Vela, can't have me beyond Wednesday.
So do I:
Stick with the train (i have a rail pass so the cost is covered) and find a way to stay in Austin until Thursday night and put up with the fact that I'll only be in Lafayette for 3 days instead of 4?
or
Find someone who is driving to, say, New Orleans leaving Wednesday who might be able to take me and drop me off in Lafayette? Do you know anyone doing Austin to Louisiana who might like an Englishman riding shotgun?
or something else… that gets me there on Thursday morning (or Wednesday night perhaps) with minimal cost and hassle and maximum interestingness.
Random Notes: Redundancy; Slowness; Lateness; Books and reading
NB: these are rough drafty notes on stuff that's going through my head
Redundancy
The temptation is to keep everything lean and only have one of everything. But often you need to know that you have enough, that if you lose or break or have to give away this one, you've always got another in your bag. This goes for people too. You can never have enough, never have too many options, no matter what it feels like. Bert and Ernie can both do the job, you only need one of them but they're a great pair to have around. Keep generating options because it's likely to be a combination of options you've come up with that will work best – lots of options make for lots of useful potential combinations.
Slowness
Travelling on a train, knowing that you're not going to get off it today, helps you appreciate the length of the day better. That is as long as you're paying attention. It's great when the train is rattling along and you know that you're making up time and all that, but it's also good to be going slowly. Slowly enough to be able to look properly at what you're passing. Look deeply, connect, know.
Lateness
In a journey that takes three days on a network where your traffic is not a priority, you will end up having to get off the train at midnight or 2am. That's OK if your patient husband or wife is there to pick you up but it's tough asking friends to do it, and even more so friends of a friend that you've never met before.
Books and reading
Lots of people ask what I'm reading – the answer is not so much. Books are too much of a psychoactive drug for me. If I was reading, i'd be off on another journey inside my head and not paying attention to what I'm doing right now. I'd be avoiding people, I'd be avoiding conversation and my story would be dominated by my reading.
SXSW is like a walled garden
So this week I'm on the outside. Not completely because the ground floor of the convention centre is open with wifi and power outlets galore. But I don't get to go up the magic escalators this year. There has been much grumbling among my peers about the agency kids, the general overwhelm of people who don't seem to get the same thing we get and the accent on the social web as a commercial tool.
It occurred to me today that SXSW is becoming like the bit of the web we don't like but still (sometimes) participate in, the walled gardens of Facebook and the AppStore. Not having a badge has given me a different perspective on the whole thing.
Some half-baked draft thoughts:
There's a price on entry and it's all about the sell – literally yes, but also because "they" might easily be doing creepy stuff to us and we'd never know (and only half care until it's too late). There's also the constant nagging feeling that whatever I'm doing, someone else is making more of a profit out of it than I am.
It's difficult to share-out – there are limits on how much video & streaming you can shoot without a press pass in sessions. Live blogging is an ultimately unsatisfying experience for blogger and reader, especially when most of the content is a thinly veiled pitch or at best self-promo.
The inside experience adds little value – there is far more intelligence, innovation experience in the room than there is on any panel. There is much more value in the conversations that go on *because* of SXSW than the conversations that happen inside. Also because of the hyper-schedule, no-one has the capacity to make really good decisions on what to go to
Most people are still just playing stupid games that annoy the rest of us while advertisers try to grab us all by the eyeballs.
And yet, we still keep coming (yes and I keep using Facebook) – at anyrate I have, for the people, the Americans that I might not see for years otherwise, but also, bizarrely to have a touch point with other people from the UK who I don't have an excuse to hang out with normally. I feel a bit left out, but I'm sure I've felt left out both of the other years I've been here. I think I feel less like I'm missing out because the option of going to a panel and missing something cool for something dismal has been taken away from me.
Day 11
Maybe not so much to write on Southby days – it's a blur and difficult to differentiate the days once you're here.
Wore my Learning Pool t-shirt, I know that much. I need to write more about Learning Pool because they are good people doing good things. I'll be wearing my tee again tomorrow and I've a few of their postcards left to hand out about mylearningpool, their online training resource for community/voluntary groups and social enterprises.
Met Rohan G for a delicious and mellow (but spicy!) thai/vietnamese lunch and got bonus Kate Ho and Jessica Williamson
Sat and wrote at the Convention Center for some time – the Trade Show doesn't start till Monday so there's an ongoing sweet power/wifi/perch spot outside there.
Bumped into Julia and Nat and went for a coffee with Nat at The Hideout by way of the Apple pop-up shop to take a sharp intake of breath looking at the line around the block waiting for an iPad 2. Headed back for a drink with the Higginbottoms and Jagir Patel who suggested I might like to talk at the Liberal Arts college in Huntingdon, PA where he went?/teaches?
Then caught up with Sarah, we went up the Frost Tower and met (among others) a delightful young lady in "digital marketing for a real estate company" so naturally fled and went to find Phil at The Ginger Man where we also found the whole Chinwag and WeAreSocial gangs. Escaped from there to Franks to fill Phil with hotdogs and found the MadeByMany posse in the line.
Um… and that was it. I know Sarah & Phil weren't impressed by being home by 10pm but it was a perfect night out for me…
Random Notes: Unexpected joys; Improvisation; Iteration with learning
I'm going to post these little jottings that I've been making while on the road – no order, structure yet, they're the bones of what I'll be writing about later. Advisory: may contain platitudes, truisms and inanity.
Unexpected joys
The joy comes mostly when you realise how it's all been leading up to this, how it all just fits together perfectly, how this marvellous moment could not have come about exactly as it is without all the other apparently less marvellous moments that contributed to you being here.
Improvisation
If I have a choice, I will always go for something made up as I go along over something with a prescribed or predefined method. This doesn't mean that there's no thinking beforehand, preparation or structure, just that I think it's importance to keep allowing for the possibility of novelty or creation to blossom out of what you're doing. This is allowing yourself to be wrong that you've already found the optimal way of doing something.
Iteration with learning
The trick is silencing the voice that says “you should know this already, you've done it before” No. In circumstances like these, you haven't done it before. Those people who have done something similar before didn't do exactly what you're doing with exactly the resources and background you have, they also did it within a different space-time. And you only really learn when you fail, so fail early and fail often and then go round the loop again. The thing to avoid is iteration without learning, that's trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, that's nuts.
Perfect Path 