Geographer playing at the SF Embassy.  Happens to be the only cellphone pic from the house that wasn't taken with Instagram. (pic by aGreatNotion)

Thanks to SXSW, the past week of crowd-free bars and restaurants in San Francisco sure was nice.  Hell, I think this was the first St. Paddy's day in years that Mission bars were not completely nuts.  And while a bunch of our SF neighbors were in Austin running around from show to party to bar to panel, meeting whomever and forming contacts until they passed out in their friend's chair at the Econo Lodge, a 150 or so Mission and SOMA kids grouped together at the SF Embassy.

The Embassy is an outpost for San Franciscans to enjoy San Francisco while being somewhere that isn't San Francisco.  The Ferocious Few, The Frail, Geographer, and Sugar & Gold all performed at The Embassy.  Local companies such as Trumer Pils and Popchips hooked 'em up with sponsorships.  Of course, most everyone there was a San Franciscan.

Wired Magazine caught up with the organizers of the Embassy, whom call themselves “Ambassadors” and are given roles at the space (such as “Minister of Transportation”), to get additional details:

Organizers passed out buttons last year so those affiliated with the SF Embassy could find each other in the giant festival’s crowds. They also enlisted Twitter’s Mark Trammell, who used to make shore-leave guides while in the Navy, to create a field guide relating San Francisco bars to their Austin counterparts. This year, they’ve created passports, pins and shot glasses, and set up each of the 11 rooms in their cluster to represent one of the San Francisco’s neighborhoods.

It was clear from the beginning that a group of that many Bay Area techies couldn’t get together and not create something more than just a crash pad, said Micah Saul, a Google ontologist and the Embassy’s minister of housing, who recruited his Metaweb colleague James Home to help with organizing after being invited by Benveniste, the chief ambassador. […]

It’s also a lot more fun. Talking with the Embassy’s organizers, it begins to feel like they’re a group of professionals planning a summer camp for adults. They talk of turf wars between “neighborhoods” (apartments), making new BFFs, having San Francisco bands play shows that they’ve organized and basically bringing what they love about San Francisco to Austin.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but I thought SXSW was all about immersing yourself in the Austin experience rather than broadening the SF bubble?  What about hanging out with people from Austin on their turf? The local bands? The local bars? The local corporate sponsors?  I kid.  But maybe these kids should exercise a little more modesty before anointing themselves the ambassadors of San Francisco.  To quote SF Embassy co-founder Gabriel Benveniste in Wired Magazine, “This is totally fucking self-aggrandizing, but I believe San Francisco is one of the most important cities in the world right now.”