Heath Row's transcripts of the SXSW panels he attends are stellar. Here are two to be sure to catch:
Dying online: Dana Robinson works for an org that provides network connectivity to chronically ill and dying children in 100 hospitals in the US and Canada. She's observed that online communities have yet to formalize any kind of social norm for coping with the death of community members (indeed, sometimes the community only infers the death from the absence of a login from some ill member over time, and confirms it much later or never) — some gamers have mass-log-in funerals, some chat systems reserve the deceased's ID and add a RIP and rememberances to her profile, some do nothing. Dana's been studying all the online norms for coping with death she can find, and in this panel, she reports on her research.
Effective Social Networks: It's clear that online communities are capable of bringing large numbers of people with common interests together, but organizing those people into some form of collective action is much harder than just assembling them.
