Sessions at SXSW Interactive 2011 about Open Data on Sunday 13th March

Over the past several years, there have been many discussions regarding how interactive technology can drive change in our nation’s politics – but of perhaps greater importance is how technology can improve the daily functioning of our nation’s government.

The discussion should not be a partisan one – this panel will bring together leading innovators from both parties to engage in a post-partisan discussion about how technology can improve the public’s interactions with their government.

This discussion should be about specifics – we can all agree on the broad principles that technology drives change – but we have all heard that conversation before. This panel will focus on the specific progress that has been made, the specific opportunities that exist in the near future, and the specific challenges that need to be addressed.

As citizens increasingly become on-demand consumers in their daily lives, it is clear that government needs to better utilize interactive technology or it will only be more radically disconnected from the public.

This is not a political conference, which is precisely why it should be where this conversation takes place – how can the innovations from the creative, marketing and interactive communities be applied to improving our nation?

Our government needs to modernize. We need to move forward and debate new ideas, focusing on how we can collectively make our government work smarter, faster and better for all citizens.

LEVEL: Intermediate

The Health 2.0 and Open Gov movements have helped unlock large repositories of data - from user-generated data in hundreds of online communities to mobile devices to federal quality indicators to medical record data within provider organizations. But much remains to be done to connect these disconnected islands of data to generate information that's meaningful and actionable by end users. And what happens when you link informed patient communities with their health data? As Clay Shirky says, it gets weird. And interesting.

A number of communities have cropped up to promote access to medical data and the integration of user-reported and behavioral data within the clinical decision stream including healthdatarights.org, #healthapps, #health2dev, #73cents, #getupandmove and #WhyPM. With the opening up of health datasets, platform APIs and increasingly sophisticated analytic engines to make user-generated health data clinically relevant, we can finally unleash the wider developer community to build robust and integrated tools to improve health and healthcare.

This session brings together some of the leading voices in the Health 2.0 movement to discuss and demo technologies that help access, mine, display and distribute control of health information across a wide variety of interfaces and devices. We will also hear how government is opening healthcare datasets for access by the developer community and how patients are increasingly becoming "n of 1" platforms.

LEVEL: Intermediate

With so much music available, finding new music that you like can
be like finding a needle in a haystack. We need new tools to help
us to explore the world of music, tools that can help us separate
the wheat from the chaff.

In this panel we will look at how visualizations can be used to
help people explore the music space and discover new, interesting
music that they will like. We will look at a wide range of
visualizations, from hand drawn artist maps, to highly interactive,
immersive 3D environments. We'll explore a number of different
visualization techniques including graphs, trees, maps, timelines
and flow diagrams and we'll examine different types of music data
that can contribute to a visualization.

Using numerous examples drawn from commercial and research systems
we'll show how visualizations are being used now to enhance music
discovery and we'll demonstrate some new visualization techniques
coming out of the labs that we'll find in tomorrow's music
discovery applications.

LEVEL: Advanced

LEVEL: Intermediate