Our Project Manager Rainy Day is attending most of the business and technology panels this week at SXSW. We will have an article on what she learned in an upcoming issue of our monthly e-newsletter, but we thought you might like to catch some of the takeaways she's jotted down so far at SXSW.

Designers' Workflow

It is good to overestimate how long a project will take, thereby including a bult-in contingency plan.

People tend to underestimate how long a project will take, because they want it to get done quickly.

You get better work from people who understand both design & development, especially CSS.

How to Create a Kickass in-House Design Team

Our measure of success is whether our users understand our product and what we’re trying to communicate. It is important to keep the internal clients happy—if they don’t like the product then we have nowhere to hide.

Key takeaways:

• How successful are the products.
• Element of follow through is important.
• Infrastructure is key. Have processes in place.
• Build the relationship with the vendor and be clear up front. Try to constrain it to work at hand. .
• Don’t ever stop being innovative or stop trying.
• Look for passion. Skills of relationship management.

Dan Rather Keynote

Asking the tough questions and the follow-ups is not as common nowadays. American journalism needs a spine transplant. You can get so close that you become part of the problem. Powerful people will use journalists to the full extent possible, right up to when the journalist says “that’s too far.” The second that a source begins to believe that a reporter is in bed with the establishment, that’s too far. And, the second that the reporter begins to feel like he or she is part of the establishment, and has to play nice, that’s too far.

Convergence Culture: Henry Jenkins

Web 2.0: Social community that works together to solve conceptual problems, remixes content.

Participatory culture is central to the world we live in today.

Step 1: expansion

Step 2: speed up

We’re now talking and watching in real time and that leads to a world of collective intelligence.

Power comes from collective energies of complex communities, demanding a richer world of content across multiple media platforms.

Intellectual property issues are at odds to an expanding participatory culture.

The line between participatory culture and participatory democracy is blurring.

Wikipedia—The most powerful thing about Wikipedia is the process by which knowledge is produced and evolves.

Bust 2.0? The Next 10 Years

Interesting potential parallel overlaps appear to be going on. Are we headed to another bust? Unlike the earlier bust period of 1999-2000, we have more people online, more advertising dollars. It is a fundamentally different time, it is much cheaper to start a business online, but we are headed for some kind of shakeout. Right now we are witnessing a sort of rebirth and flowering of innovation, with a much tighter feedback loop, an unprecendented feedback loop, at that. What’s amazing about the infrastructure shift is services are much easier to provide.

What does the boom/bust mean to established businesses? Example: Discovery Channel tries to meet the demand of its customers. In Web 2.0, customer support is very important. Do viral marketing. Start with email and move up to widgets.

Molly Steensen on Outsourcing-India/China/Russia: you’ll find an extraordinarily intelligent, creative group of people. They offer different approaches to things we’re doing and have educational models like labs and incubators.

Remember, this is a global community. It is important to get a team that works well together and that can be really hard especially on a global scale. Communication is hard even regardless of language or time barriers.