LAST DAY! LAST DAY! VOTING ENDS 8/31!

Can’t wait until November to cast your ballot? Ever wish you could pick more than one candidate? Now you can. What’s more, you can engage in a little computer-based community activism and encourage your friends to vote early and often as well.

Two members of the UMSI faculty have proposed sessions for the highly competitive South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas next March. A popular vote will help determine which sessions are ultimately offered at the conference, so members of the UMSI community are strongly encouraged to root for the home team by voting for our two representatives’ sessions.

Charles “Dr. Chuck” Severance, UMSI clinical associate professor, and Curtis Bonk of Indiana University hope to present “Cage Match: The Massive Open Online Debate.” Dr. Chuck teaches a free massive online course (MOOC) on the history of the internet offered by Coursera. Dr. Bonk (aka “The Travelin’ Ed Man) taught the first MOOC on Blackboard’s CourseSites and is author of The World is Open.

The two men will be looking at how these courses are set up and managed, and the implications for business, continuing education, and future hiring.

Vote for Dr. Chuck’s presentation here.

Assistant professor Finn Brunton is proposing a panel on “Creativity and Mayhem: Anonymous Communities at Work.”  Communities like Anonymous and 4chan's /b/ create Internet culture, change politics and make news. But how do they build trust, share work and intervene in the world? While Facebook and Google push for an Internet of real names and persistent identities, Finn’s panelists will present an alternate universe of thriving, chaotic cultures created by nobody in particular - and their implications for activism, politics and creativity online.

Vote for Finn’s panel here.

And UMSI alumnus Hung Truong reminds us that he too has a prospective session with entrepreneurs who have built mashup companies based on other companies’ data/platforms. His group will present “In Defense of Mashups: Bootstrapping or Stealing?”

Read more and vote for Hung here.

Voters must create a free account on the SXSW site to avoid spam. Voting is open now through August 31.