South by Southwest (SXSW) is an annual festival and conference held every spring in Austin, Texas, dedicated to bringing together creative indviduals from around the world for a week-long celebration of music, film, and interactive technology. The interactive portion of the festival features over 150 panel discussions on cutting-edge topics in the new media industry and culture, as well as a trade show, Web Awards Competition, video game tournament, and some great after-parties.

Not only was the main SXSW Web site recently redesigned and relaunched in Drupal, but there are a number of really great Drupal-related panel proposals suggested for the interactive festival, which which will be held March 13-17, 2009. We need your help to make sure that Drupal is well-represented at SXSW because it offers an opportunity to reach out to a lot of new people who are not part of the traditional developer community. This past spring's festival included a Content Management System Roundup panel with George DeMet and Tiffany Farriss of Palantir and Jeff Eaton of Lullabot that attracted more attendees than all of Drupalcon Boston.

You have the opportunity to register your support for these proposals by going to the Interactive Festival Panel Picker, which is a Web site that allows you to review, vote for, and comment on all of the more than 1200 panel proposals that were submitted. The festival's organizers take feedback from this site into account when making their decisions for which panels are included in the final program. You can create an account and register your opinions regardless of whether you're planning to attend or not. The Panel Picker will be open until August 29, and the final panel selections will be announced starting in October.

If you’re interested in having Drupal represented at SXSW, providing positive feedback for these session proposals is a great and easy way to show your support:

• Yes, You Can Make Beautiful Sites with Drupal! by George DeMet of Palantir.net:
  A panel of Web gurus will share their experiences working with creative partners and colleagues to develop visually stunning and highly functional Web sites using the Drupal content management platform. Learn tactical tips and tricks that will help you bend Drupal to your will and create your own beautiful sites! This session will incorporate some material from the Dos and Don’ts of Designing in Drupal talk at Drupalcon Szeged later this month, but will also include insights from other people directly involved in designing and building Drupal sites.
• Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny by George DeMet of Palantir.net:
  This session is based on an idea that we came up with last year at SXSW while planning , and will will feature the results of a Iron Chef-style competition where three teams of experienced Web developers are chosen to build the same Web site in three different content management platforms (including Drupal) for a worthy not-for-profit organization, who decides the winner based on which one meets their needs best.
• Drupal With Its Pants Off by Jeff Eaton of Lullabot:
  Drupal is an open-source web framework that powers sites like The Onion, Fast Company magazine, MTVUK, Amnesty Online, and innumerable web communities. The Drupal-buzz is growing, but cutting through the hype is a challenge. Should you use Drupal to build your social publishing platform? Will it melt your servers and scare your users, or cure cancer? The panel will also be a chance to grill the the folks who've built some of the biggest and baddest Drupal sites around.
• Start to Finish Drupal Redesign by Sarah Davies of the ACLU of Washington:
  This presentation will go through the technical details of a start to finish Drupal redesign, including theming, plugins, coding, testing, and cost. A basic knowledge of php and css is highly recommended for this panel to make sense to you.
• Using Drupal to Manage, Publish, and Promote Your Content by Robert Scales of Raincity Studios:
  Drupal is a fast-growing content management system built by a loose knit community committed to making a highly usable and infinitely extendable publishing platform ideal for individuals to enterprises. Learn how to use Drupal to organize content, publicize your message, and activate your audience.
• Turn Your Old Media Empire into a New Media Paradise by Eric Marden of Bonnier Corp.:
  Companies that have been at forefront of the publishing revolution, before the days of the internet, have recently found themselves behind the eight ball. While they struggle with their digital strategy, smaller leaner companies have been capturing their traditional audience on the web. However, many of these companies forget that the ability to create compelling engaging content is their greatest asset. Instead of placing their focus on pages views, they should be placing it on the pages themselves. This presentation will show how we used Drupal and other open source technologies to to transform a couple of 100 year old magazines into fresh and relevant web 2.0 destinations - from both a technical and philosophical perspective.
• Good Design, Powerful Content Management by Guild Copeland of Sisu:
  Web design shops face a nagging challenge. How to make content-managed sites have style and branding chops? We’ll take you through Drupal and Cake examples to demo how to break free from homogenized templates with a little help from a creative development approach, tech-savvy creative, and the sIFR tool.

If you know of any Drupal sessions that aren't included here, please feel free to post them in the comments below.