Vote now: Kansas Citians vie to lead tech, education panels at SXSW 2019

A cadre of Kansas Citians are hoping to take the podium at one of the nation’s largest tech and innovation conferences in 2019.

At least four Kansas City tech and entrepreneurship leaders are vying for panel or speaking spots at the 2019 South by Southwest conference March 8-17 in Austin, Texas. SXSW recently opened voting on its “Panelpicker,” which is a user-generated platform allowing attendees to encourage and support topics they’d like to see at the conference.

Voting — which requires a user to create a free account — can be completed via each of the links below. Voting is open until Aug. 30.

Here’s a bit more on each of the Kansas Citians’ presentations.

School Networks: Unlocking Our Future Prosperity

Local leader: Corey Mohn, executive director of Blue Valley CAPS

The pitch: Corporate brands are experimenting with innovative new approaches to identify the talent needed to meet workforce demands. Starting as early as high school, these industry leaders are partnering with students and facilitating authentic, high-skill professional projects. Come learn about the exciting work products being created by students, and the “playgrounds” schools can create to catalyze these profession-based learning engagements.

Goals: To gain a new understanding for how corporations are seeking to engage the K-12 education system via school networks; To discover methods to develop opportunities for schools to showcase young talent to the community; and to discover methods to develop opportunities for businesses to directly engage with students as a regular part of the curriculum.

Future of Living

Local leader: Blake Miller, co-founder of Homebase

The pitch: The Future of Living is an exploration of how people connect to the places they live with technology. In this session, we will dive into the latest Internet of Things (IoT) and smart living technologies, trends affecting the spaces and places that make up smart cities, and new ways for managing life as more and more of the things around us get connected.

Goals: Our future living spaces must evolve for today’s on-demand service economy. They should enable us to save time and connect us to the world.

Shifting Mindsets: What’s Family Got To Do With It

Local leaders: Murray Woodard, program officer at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and Cokethea Hill, director of family and community engagement at SchoolSmartKC

The pitch: Historically, schools have defined and designed engagement efforts for families based on the schools’ needs and goals for parent involvement, with outcomes hyper-focused on attendance to events and responsiveness to school lead/ directed engagement. What if this is all wrong? What if we need to shift our thinking to revolve around what parents and students need for successful academic and life outcomes? Come to this session and explore another paradigm for engaging schools with families.

Goals: To Identify evidence based frameworks for designing effective family and community engagement initiatives at the school level; to identify academic partnering strategies and practices that build trusting relationships with families and community members; and to understand the importance of leveraging culturally competent strategies when building the capacity of families and school staff.

Rural Entrepreneurship

Local leader: Chris Harris, program manager at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

The pitch: In May 2018, 175 leaders from more than 25 states assembled in rural Appalachia to highlight the unique challenges and opportunities facing rural entrepreneurship and ecosystem development. Over the course of the three days, attendees participated in exercises to learn about how best to increase entrepreneurial activities in rural communities. This session will highlight the insights from the RuralRISE Summit, and address the challenges, opportunities and success stories of rural entrepreneurship.

Goals: To challenge opportunities and success stories of rural entrepreneurship; to get more people engaged in creating opportunity for entrepreneurship to thrive in rural communities; and to help policy makers, funders and entrepreneurship ecosystem builders collaborate and fill gaps that address barriers to entrepreneurship in rural.

Did we miss a local SXSW hopeful who’s vying for a spot at the conference? Send us an email at news@startlandnews.com