The SxSW Interactive Festival has been coming of age the last few years, and the March 2007 Festival, themed “Making Ideas Real,” boasted several panels and speakers focused on real-world applications of technology and emerging trends to watch. Keynote speaker Will Wright expanded on the theme by stating that “Technology is an extension of the human body/expression. The most important things computers do for us is extend our imaginations. The computer is becoming a tool of self expression through websites, blogs, etc. and paradigm shifts are hitting us more and more frequently over time.”

A dramatic shift in the focus of SxSW Interactive is the impact of Web 2.0 as a platform for collaboration technologies such as wikis, social networking technologies and effective machine to machine communication and many of the SxSW Interactive events focused on Web 2.0 topics. In the panel “Emerging Social and Technology Trends,” the four pillars of Web 2.0 were defined as technologies that support social interaction, enable and encourage user participation, lead to an enhanced user experience (such as rating and tagging options) and are characterized by open access to data.

The “Convergence Culture” speech by Henry Jenkins defined Web 2.0 as social community that works together to solve conceptual problems by remixing content. Wikipedia, probably the best known wiki, stands as a monument to participatory culture with its open process by which knowledge is produced and made available to the public. From a business perspective there are valid concerns that intellectual property issues are at odds with an expanding participatory culture.

Population and demographic trends influencing the social and technological forces shaping the emergence of Web 2.0 range from extremely local advances allowing us to connect data to where we live at micro level to the expansion of instant collaboration with global users. The technological infrastructure of the “Global South,” essentially comprised of Africa, India and China, is limited in many cases to Internet access via phone lines which is an important factor in designing Web 2.0 sites since the vast majority of future audiences and consumers will originate in these regions.

How to harvest the potential of customer interfaces to take advantage of collaborative technologies was explored in the panels “World Domination via Collaboration,” which included a lively debate on best practices for opening your web portal to customer comments and “Virtual Teaming: Collaboration Across Time and Space,” exploring the challenges of a 24/7 work environment comprised of co-workers you may never meet or even talk to in real time.

The panel “Virtual Teaming: Collaborating Across Time and Space” offered an astute analysis on outsourcing, primarily to India, China and Russia. The panelists affirmed that with some searching you’ll find an extraordinarily intelligent, creative group of people with different approaches to things we’re doing and educational models like learning labs and incubators. This is a global community and it’s important to cultivate teams that work well together, and that can be especially difficult on a global scale as good communication is challenging regardless of language or time barriers.

The consensus across several of the panels is that small teams are the most effective, regardless of locale. It’s ideal to have one person from each discipline in order to originate the best ideas and products, and gain more respect for everyone’s fields and specialties. According to industry leaders like Google, communication tends to break down when the team gets larger than 12 so at that point it’s best to divide into smaller, more specialized teams to facilitate effective flow of communication.

Certainly there are no conclusive solutions to the difficulty of working on and managing a physically disparate team but emerging technologies are blurring time zones and making effective long-distance collaboration more feasible and cost-effective.