Thank you, Elisa Camahort, for organizing such an interesting and engaging panel. Now I really want to attend BlogHer because I’m sure you organize a kick-ass conference.

It was also really wonderful to hear from Annalee Newitz (co-editor of the very awesome She’s Such a Geek), Dawn Foster, and my friend Erica Rios. Erica made poignant references to women’s involvement in creating technology and to the opportunities available to women via open source, which received a round of applause. Needless to say, that discussion needs to be continued.

Note to Hugh Forrest: Bring back Elisa as a moderator — or maybe as a keynote?! — and bring back these panelists to continue a discussion that brought everyone to the table!

Come to the WaSP Annual Meeting where we’ll tell you what we’ve been up to, and where we’ll be Takin’ it to the Street on Monday, March 12 at 5 PM.

My AOL pals are doing another “How to Convince Your Company” panel, this time on embracing mashup culture. And Arun is also doing a browser wars panel, and I honestly can’t think of anyone else who’d be better at leading such a discussion.

I was surprised to learn that PayPal is also getting involved in SXSW, by sponsoring an evening event: the PayPal SXSW Showdown. I’m going to meet the organizer later today and find out what it’s all about. If you want to attend, be sure to RSVP!

Other stuff I’m looking forward to…

• Finally meeting fellow WaSP Steph Troeth
• Getting to room and geek out with Erica Rios (Xicanista) of the Anita Borg Institute
• Connecting with fellow Mawrter Sarah Tan, and
• Finding the perfect person to fill the Web Standards Evangelist position I have open at PayPal!

If you see me, stop me and say hello!

The good folks at the SxSW Festival have finally posted the podcasts for the panels that I was a part of. The following links will take you straight to the MP3s:

• WTF: WaSP Task Force Panel – Getting the Job Done Right, in which I talk about the activities of the Education Task Force.
• WaSP Annual Meeting, during which we launched the new WaSP Web site (sort of).
• How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Standards, in which my old friends from AOL and I tell you how a grass roots effort can create change! You can also view the slides from our presentation, or read the transcript! (Thanks, Kevin and Steve!)

The crazy thing about SxSW is that you get busy and don’t have time to do the things you mean to do. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just the way it is. So you go with the flow.

Anyway, I wanted to post notes, cool quotes, and links to folks I’ve met (or reunited with). I’ll update this whenever I have time… maybe not until after I get home!

So far, here are some new folks that I’ve met:

• Ryan and Adam from Infinity Web Design, on the flight from Minneapolis to Austin
• Baratunde (meaning: one who is chosen) at Breaking Bread with Brad
• Kit Seeborg, one of the Webvisions organizers
• Eric Hansen, Minister of Culture (definitely the best title I’ve seen in a while!) at Tom Peters
• Pat Ramsey, standards wrangler at Southwestern University

There are many people here that I already knew (virtually) but am meeting for the first time:

• Chris Kaminski, a fellow WaSP member, and the guy who saved me from having to take time to write some scripts for the new site when I was still busy working on templates and design issues
• Drew McLellan, another fellow WaSP and creator of 24ways
• Kazuhito Kidachi, yet another fellow WaSP, whose done a fine job of translating and testing for the group

And I’ve gotta call out some of my AOL and ex-AOL friends:

• Tom Crenshaw, fellow hockey fan, Corrado enthusiast, and author of the foreward to the Flash 8 Bible
• JoRoan Lazaro, creator of the AOL Running Man

There are some really good pictures up on flickr from various activities, too:

• The WaSP ATF
• Me at the WaSP badge-making table
• How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Standards Panelists (including me!)

And all of my photos are up on Flickr as well.

And here are the slides from the panel I did with my AOL pals!

I’ll toot my own horn a bit and admit to my role in the redesign, which was the porting of the design created by Andy Clarke to WordPress. A proud moment for me just yesterday was in describing how I accomplished some of the content presentation objectives to Matt Mullenweg; he told me that I’d figured out some pretty cool stuff (which I fully intend to write about in the future)! But projects like this aren’t accomplished single-handedly, so I have to give big virtual hugs to Chris Casciano for porting tons of content to WP, Chris Kaminski for doing the scripting, and Holly Marie Koltz for doing lots of QA and content tweaking.

Meanwhile, the response to the Education Task Force has been overwhelming. I’ve probably got 30+ business cards and notes in my suitcase from folks wanting to know how they can help in our mission, as well as wanting to know how they can help affect change in their schools. And the contacts and ideas keep coming in via e-mail too… now to get some plans together! You can be sure that you’ll be hearing more from the eduTF soon.