Voting on panels for South by Southwest 2016 (SXSW) wraps up soon, giving just a few more hours to bring the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to SXSW scheduled for March 11-15 in Austin, Texas.
In August, NGA submitted two proposals to participate for the first time at the festival, an event which offers a unique industry convergence of music, film, and emerging technologies. NGA’s panel proposals are among more than 6,000 submitted this year, according to the SXSW website.
First launched in March of 1987, SXSW offers a platform for creative organizations and people from around the globe to meet, learn and share ideas. The festival features new media presentations, music showcases, and film screenings, as well as conference panel discussions where industry leaders can meet and spark new ideas.
With a large number of high-quality entries, the selection process is extremely competitive. If selected, it would be NGA’s first trip to the annual festival, which attracted more than 30,000 attendants from more than 85 countries in 2015.
“SXSW is the premiere event in the country for new ideas and creative technologies,” said Ben Tuttle, NGA mobile apps team lead. “But we need help to get there.”
NGA is a unique combination of intelligence agency and combat support agency. It delivers world-class geospatial intelligence that provides a decisive advantage to policymakers, warfighters, intelligence professionals and first responders.
Voting is still open for the NGA Panels, but is expected to close Friday night. The panels include the following:
Find Pirates from your couch
NGA is in your local mobile app store and on GitHub. With NGA’s apps you can find pirates from your couch and access geospatial information even when you don’t have a network connection. And, with the source code for these apps on GitHub, you can help make these projects even better. Our goal is to increase the impact of government investments and take things in new directions. Got an innovative geospatial-flavored mobile app of your own? We’re all ears. We even have a program to pay you for it. NGA is the nation’s primary source of geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT. Vote for this panel.
What in the world is NGA?
Calling all map geeks and data nerds. We’re opening up for a look at a day in the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. What’s NGA? Basically, anyone who navigates with a cellphone relies on us. Staff will discuss working on complex intel questions in our new unclassified lab, providing disaster relief support (and making that data publicly available) in world crises like the Ebola outbreak and Nepal earthquake, as well as some of the cool tech being developed by our R&D team. Want to get involved? We’ll show you what we’re sharing on GitHub and what areas we are hiring in. NGA is the nation’s primary source of geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT. Vote for this panel.
“When it comes to developing mobile applications or engaging with the open source community, NGA is leading the way within the intelligence community,” said Tuttle. “SXSW represents a unique opportunity for NGA to show the world the kind of innovative and inventive agency we really have become.”
The SXSW Panel Picker allows the community to browse, leave comments, and vote for what they think are the best fit for the March event. In order to vote, users must create an account or login using their Facebook credentials. Voting ends Sept. 4, 2015.
