Back in October, South by Southwest Interactive faced one of the worst PR challenges of its 23-year history: the cancellation of two panel, one related to online harassment and the other about gaming communities created a huge blowback and was met with the threat of boycotts from several media companies and panelists.
After a very bad week, the festival eventually announced an all-day Online Harassment Summit that will take place on Saturday, March 12 at the Hyatt Regency Austin. Speakers scheduled for the day of panels include Online Abuse Prevention Initiative founder Randi Harper, Anti-Defamation League national director Jonathan Greenblatt, Massachusetts U.S. congresswoman Katherine Clark and former Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis.
The event is open to SXSW Interactive, Film, Gold and Platinum badgeholders.
Casey Slater, new initiatives coordinator at SXSW, spoke to us via email about what to expect at the Summit and how it came together:
Casey Slater: All but two panels were curated specifically for the summit after various meetings with our speakers, conversations with experts in the community and feedback from a panel survey that we sent out to all committed participants (at that time) in December.
I wouldn’t mind a highly invested audience -- the speakers at this summit have traveled far to identify solutions to combat online hate and harassment. The summit has also been discussed extensively in the press and I think many are invested in being a part of the larger conversation. In terms of broadening the audience, we have partnered with numerous groups including GEER, Jigsaw (formerly Google Ideas), the Anti-Defamation League and Intel, to assist in securing speakers and promoting the event.
Online harassment is a very relevant topic -- but we won’t make any decisions on the 2017 event until after the 2016 event concludes.
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