The South by Southwest (SXSW) festival hold an Interactive Festival. The Interactive Festival has been dubbed “summer camp for geeks” since at least 2009.
 
SXSW itself has been nicknamed “spring break for nerds.”
 
   
Wikipedia: South by Southwest
South by Southwest (SXSW) is a set of film, interactive, and music festivals and conferences that take place every spring (usually in March) in Austin, Texas, United States. SXSW began in 1987, and has continued to grow in size every year. In 2011, the conference lasted for 10 days, with SXSW Interactive lasting for five, Music for six, and Film running concurrently for nine days.
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SXSW Interactive Festival
SXSW Interactive is focused on emerging technology, a focus which has earned the festival a reputation as a breeding ground for new ideas and creative technologies. According to a festival organizer Louis Black, SXSW Interactive “has probably been the biggest of its kind in the world” since 2007.
 
Callender Creates
SxSw 2009 wrap up
25 March 2009
This was our second year to what can only be described as the mother of all Web Tech Events, each year thousands of entrepreneurs, start-ups, geeks, bloggers, and industry types attend SxSw in Austin, Texas.
 
Depending on who you talk to, SxSw is all about the 1000 different panelists talking tech to a very enthusiastic International audience, others refer to it as ‘summer camp for geeks‘
 
WorldBook Project
SXSW Interactive 2009 Thoughts
By Dee Cook, March 25th, 2009
If you’re on Twitter, chances are your feed was swamped last week by SXSW attendees. I’ll admit to being one of the guilty parties. This marked my fourth year at SXSW interactive and my second as a panelist. The conference is growing at what seems to be an exponential rate (over 10,000 attendees in 2009!) and has been described as Summer Camp for Geeks.
 
Maine News Updates
SXSW: A bubble waiting to burst? Summer camp for geeks? An underwater pyramid?
Submitted by Justin Ellis on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 12:11
I was thumbing through my notebook looking over what I had written about South by Southwest Interactive and came across this: “What the hell just happened?” Good question. It’s been over 24 hours since I departed Austin and left SXSW behind and I’m still not sure what I just covered, or more honestly, what I was just a part of. It’s not exactly a conference or a convention in the true sense (though there is lots of business card swapping). It’s not a straight-up trade show (though there is plenty of schwag to go around). It’s not a festival (not enough hippies sleeping in tents…yet.)  But here’s an theory I’d been mulling over the past week: SXSW as summer camp. Think about it: There’s the tribes that sprout up because of shared interests, the spontaneous friendships, the mind-boggling social events, the learning of new skills and discovery of new interest and a general disconnection with your life at home
     
Blue Deer Designs
March 19, 2010
Summer camp for geeks: SXSW 2010 Interactive
I embarked on my first trip to Austin to attend the 2010 SXSW Interactive Conference. Boy, I had no idea what I would learn and who I would meet. For five days I was in a bubble with 13,000 other digital professionals and all-around smart folks.  It was an immersive experience that blew me out of the water and rearranged my brain and how I think.
     
The Daily Texan (University of Texas)
Film, tech, music enthusiasts flock to SXSW
Published on March 18, 2012 at 10:25 pm
BY ANJLI MEHTA
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Unfortunately, no major apps were launched at the appropriately nicknamed “summer camp for geeks;” however, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom teased the app’s unreleased and highly anticipated Android version. Systrom told the crowd at his panel that Instagram’s Android app is in some ways better than the original app, which is currently only available on the iPhone.