Archive for Information Architecture
Filed under Information Architecture, Me, me, me!
December 16, 2008 at 2:17 am
One of things I volunteered to do as soon as I re-joined the IAI board was to write a letter that goes out to members with the monthly newsletter.
I procrastinated for 2 weeks to write it because I was trying to understand a problem and it was just not happening. I think I finally came to terms with it.
Hello fellow practitioners!
In the past 60 days I had the opportunity to take a closer look at the IA Institute and observe how it operates, recognize where some opportunities are and identify some of the challenges that we need to vercome.
It was a very edifying process, but a gruesome activity. Did you know our websites and service run on 26 different Movable Type blogs (version 2.6.6.1 from 2004)? Me neither. It’s magic what our volunteers were able to accomplish by hacking and patching that system; mad mad skills, I tell you.
Apart from technical marvels, that discovery process allowed me to think about what the Institute means to me and what it can mean to us in the future.
In recent years I had become more distant from the Institute and also noticed that many of my peers become more detached and less involved with the activities associated with it. I wondered what that meant.
This November was the 6th anniversary of the IAI. I was disappointed that we as a community didn’t remember or see the need to celebrate. That’s when I understood why I had drifted away myself: I just didn’t recognize the Institute as the face of our community of practice anymore.
Thinking about this I re-visited http://info-arch.org and was immediately reminded of where we came from. That was a time when our community was blooming with energy and we were screaming for action. Very talented and dedicated people came together, and out of that desire to evolve our practice, to raise awareness and understanding for what we do and to help move our profession forward, created a thriving international organization that brought our community together.
There was a strong vision from the get-go and progress was palpable. At any time I was involved, whether it was translating an article, mentoring a new professional or helping out during a local event, I knew I was making a difference in our community. It was a pleasure to spend the time and see others contributing as well.
Over the years, we have collectively established ourselves as practitioners and, along with our careers and the paths we have chosen, our needs have evolved. Many have drifted apart because they don’t feel the Institute is supporting their individual needs anymore. Others still feel great affinity for what the Institute represents to (and for) this community and continue to be involved and volunteer.
Today we have a great opportunity and an even bigger challenge. We can turn this organization into exactly what we need it to be. And not only for our current set of circumstances, but also for the future. We have matured along with our practice and we need an organization that can continue to support a mature and growing practice while helping a new generation of practitioners join the job market.
Let’s make the Information Architecture Institute the place that connects the legacy of our community and our professional future. Speak out now: What do you need? What do you want? How can you help? How can you be helped?
We must understand what our collective needs are in order to continue to build an organization that is relevant and sustainable. The Institute exists to provide infrastructure and build bridges across and beyond our community. Use those assets; tell the Institute what you need that isn’t there today. Let’s ensure the energy and resources from the Institute are used towards the things that really matter to you.
You can use the discussion list (1), our website (2), Twitter (3), our Get Satisfaction engine (4), Facebook (5), LinkedIn (6), talk to your peers and colleagues, your friends and family. Let’s have this conversation and figure it out together.
I am very excited about what we will accomplish in the next year and I most certainly expect you to participate and make the IA Institute work for you.
Happy holidays,
Livia Labate
Director of Getting Things Done
The Information Architecture Institute
(1) http://lists.iainstitute.org/listinfo.cgi/iai-members-iainstitute.org
(2) http://iainstitute.org
(3) http://twitter.com/iainstitute
(4) http://getsatisfaction.com/iai
(5) http://is.gd/4Iz
(6) http://is.gd/bUps
Filed under Good Experiences, Information Architecture
December 8, 2008 at 1:23 pm
During the last IA Summit, Jacco Nieuwland, Nathan Curtis and myself organized the first Wall of Deliverables, a display area dedicated to documentation and tools used to convey and articulate the work that we do as UX professionals.
Check out more photos from the Wall of Deliverables.
We had a great crowd viewing and discussing the displayed deliverables all through the summit, thanks to a bunch of people who took the time to submit an entry. We were very satisfied with the results and received a lot of valuable feedback, so of course, we are doing it again!
To give you a sense of what it takes to make it happen, we’ve had two planning meetings so far where we discuss lessons learned and reviewed all feedback in detail, then started planning what steps need to be taken to set it up next Summit.
We have to figure out what kind of space we are dealing with (determined by the IA Summit organizers) so we can design the best walk-through flow and allow for people to hang out and discuss. We learned from last years that having to squat and squint was not the best thing for the deliverables that were hanging low on the wall, so we’re trying to get more horizontal space to ensure easy access and allow the deliverables to be more spread out.
We also learned that our entry form was taking more space than it needed and not helping convey as much as we wanted, so we’re picking more appropriate fields and designing is so that it’s legible and so that you can see the submission number from space.
The voting process was pretty smooth last year and the feedback indicated people were very satisfied with the prizes, but we’re looking into new options to make things fresh. If you’d like to sponsor, drop me a note!
One of the most effort intensive aspects of this initiative is to spend time hanging out around the Wall, helping contributors include their deliverables and answer questions from the crowd. Last year we conveniently placed a printer right there, but we really want to encourage people to submit and print in advance next time. It still is a lot of effort so if you would like to volunteer 30 minutes of your time to help facilitate, let me know!
We are toying around with some other very exciting ideas that I was planning on writing down on this post but that I just realize it will be much more fun if they are a surprise, so I’ll just leave it at that!
Nathan, Jacco and I will start broadcasting to the various UX outlets that you can submit deliverables as soon as we have our first to-dos out of the way, particularly coordinating with the IA Summit committee about how the Wall of Deliverables will be part of the program and how we’ll make people aware of what’s going on throughout the event.
If you have ideas, suggestions and comments, please let us know!
Filed under Bad Experiences, Information Architecture
November 24, 2008 at 1:22 am
When I started evaluating the IA Institute overall tech infrastructure I was not expecting the messiest part to be related to the various discussion lists we provide to the community. I was first surprised, now I’m annoyed.
The list software we use is Mailman, which is extremely popular and very good at one thing: delivering mail. I guess they chose a pretty appropriate name for it. Other than that, it’s pretty sucky.
My intention when I started to take a look at our discussion lists was to understand how extensible our technology was to support any future plans (indexing archives, subscribing to threads, integration list subscription with membership profile, RSS subscription, etc). What I’ve found is a messy legacy that needs to be at least normalized before we can think of expanding its capabilities.
Here’s a list of all the discussion lists we have:
aifia-announce -IA Institute announcements.
AIfIA-da -Om informationsarkitektur på dansk
Aifia-education -Discussion of IA education
AIfIA-es -Instituto para la Arquitectura de Información
Aifia-fr – IA discussion in French
Aifia-it – IA discussion in Italian
Aifia-ja – IA discussion in Japanese
Aifia-mentoring – AIfIA Mentoring Initiative
Aifia-metrics – Towards standard methods and metrics for evaluating IA
AIfIA-nl – IA discussion in Dutch
AIfIA-pt – IA discussion in Portuguese
Aifia-tools – Discussion list for the AIfIA Tools initiative
Advisors – IAI Advisors
Arqinf -Lista de Discusión sobre Arquitectura de la Información
Board – Board of Directors
Directors – IAI Board of Directors
Eastcoastretreat – New Challenges Retreat list
eiaproject – Higher Education in IA Working Group
EnterpriseIA – Enterprise IA Discussion List
iai-aunz – Australia New Zealand Region IA Discussion List
iai-jobs -IA Institute Job Newsletter
Iai-Members – IA Institute Members Discussion List
Iai-Mentoring – IAI Mentoring Discussion List
Iai-Newsletter – IA Institute Newsletter
IAI-pt – Lista de Discussão AI-pt
iai-translations – IAI Translations Discussion List
Localgroups – local IA groups
Management – IAI Management
Meta IAI – Meta List
Secondlife – IA Institute Second Life Discussion List
Test – yes, it’s what you are guessing
Ux-Management – UX Management Discussion List
From this list it should be easy to tell that we (the IA Institute) have not been big on naming conventions. I created some of these lists at one point or another as I volunteered in different initiatives, but I didn’t even know all of them were out there. I would love to be able to go to the IAI website and just know what’s available (right now the site shows a partial list).
Some of these lists, I am sure, are dead. But somebody forgot to pull the plug. Also, between managing subscribers and moderating discussions, there is this horrible thing called the discussion list interface. Mailman as I said before is good at one thing and that’s not its user interface. It’s impressively adequate in terms of multi-lingual support and is flexible enough that you can customize presentation to fit your website (We have tried before), but if you don’t have a standard way to to do in an organization with such high volume, this mess is inevitable.
If it’s not clear from the rant above, many lists still have our old organization name (Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture) and are hosted at ibiblio.org, which provides free discussion lists. Another issue: We host our site and systems on Dreamhost. Their Mailman implementation doesn’t allow me to go directly and finagle with the lists directly (like merge archives or modify the code) so I have to ask them to do it, which means any changes may take a while.
Now that I’ve bitched about the current situation, here’s what I believe needs to happen:
Get rid of lists we don’t need to maintain.
Evaluate if an alternate software to Mailman is a better fit for our organization
Create some basic guidelines for starting discussion lists
Migrate ibiblio discussion lists to iainstitute.org
Merge archives of lists that should be consolidated
Notify subscribers about any plans
Do you have experience with discussion lists? Drop me a note if you have any advice or suggestions. I’m particularly interested in systems that have discussion lists associated with member/profile management associated with other services. Anyone has experience with Drupal; any Drupal modules for discussion lists?
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