As we discussed live, if everyone in that conversation, whether elected to the board or not, continues to press for these kinds of improvements, then the IAI and (more importantly) the IA and larger UX communities will benefit.

I am curious to to know which IAI efforts you think might be “withering” ones “that eat up the limited capacity we have”?

James, that’s a question I have myself. When we picked ‘open’ for Open IAI it did come from the identifying how these ideas seemed very in sync with what the Open Source movement accomplishes.

However, you are dead on the problem. We aren’t working together to create the best possible product. But I do think we can figure out how to extrapolate the model in service of advancing a discipline for example.

I am curious however, about what you perceive “a member organization” to be (for the IAI). One of my observations about the IAI has been that when it started out I felt violently how much of a volunteering effort it was. Today, it feels very very different. This is only my perception, but volunteering doesn’t sound like the assumed, primary force there. I could be wrong, but anyway, I don’t know why that happened.

Regardless, I’m really hoping you’re one of the smart brains that’s going to figure this one out. One way to look at it is actually something I just came across – the concept or Radical Transparency. In contrast to accountability, it requires decision making to be transparent from the get-go in the decision making process, while accountability is a process of verifying the quality of decisions or actions after they have been taken.

In that lens, accountability is almost punitive while Radical Transparency is less judgmental and encourages corrections and improvements before poor decisions have the chance to be enacted. I like that as a model. I just wrote a little bit about trying to figure out how ‘transparency’ gets implemented: http://livlab.com/thinkia/2008/09/do-or-do-not-there-is-no-try/