SXSW gets 5,000 panel proposals each year during July PanelPicker period

AUSTIN (KXAN) — South by South West’s process to pick panels for the 2020 festival opens this week, and anyone can submit a proposal for a session they’d like to produce.

The annual festival of ideas, music, film and technology uses an online tool called PanelPicker to collect ideas from July 1 to July 19. Each year SXSW gets about 5,000 proposals for various panels, from which it selects about 500 to feature.

Once the submission period closes, SXSW grades all the panel suggestions through an advisory board, staff and, crucially, feedback and comments from the public during two and a half weeks in August.

That feedback “can make or break a session that we’re on the fence about,” said Dhinuka Perera, SXSW’s conference programmer.

On KXAN News Today, meet a local woman who had a panel selected for SXSW 2019 and hear her process for submitting ideas.