B&A Summit wrapups

Boxes and Arrows gives us their usual awesome summary of the Summit:

Overview

Saturday

Sunday, Monday

Trip report - Laurie Lamar

Laurie Lamar presented a report on the IA Summit to the Rocky Mountain STC chapter in April. PDF, 800K.

ibm.com - Webby Award - vote

For those of you who liked the ibm.com poster at the IA Summit, you can also vote for us for a Webby Award. We are 1 of 5 finalists in the IT/Hardware/Software category.

• Background information about the ibm.com re-design
  
• About the Webby Awards
  
• Where to register your People's Voice vote
  

IA Summit Recordings

If you would like to listen to the the Summit sessions, I have recorded a total of 20 presentations, including the IA Institute leadership seminar, and both keynotes. You can download the mp3s from livlab.com.

If you want to blog about this, please don't link directly to the mp3s' URLs, files will be moved to a different server soon.

Notes from Business and Design BOF?

Does anyone have their notes available of the Business and Design Birds of a Feather session on Sunday?

I was presenting at the time and couldn't attend. Any action points, initiatives, mailinglists, shared resources, etc. that I should know of?

Summit Redux Washington DC Area

Date/Time: Saturday April 9, 10am - 1pm
Location: Bethesda Public Library
Format: Panel sessions and discussion
Directions: http://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/Apps/Libraries/branchinfo/be.asp

Light refreshments will be served, and a donation of $5 is requested.

Email stacy at greenfx dot net if you'd like to join us.

Hosted by DCIA (http://www.dc-ia.com)

IA Summit Redux - Northwest Europe

In anticipation of an European IA Summit, I want to propose a 'local' redux of this year's summit in Montreal, as well.

We can host one at Multimedia Skills in Driebergen, the Netherlands (which is only 45 minute drive from Amsterdam and a couple of hours from Belgium and Germany or even Denmark and the North of France).

Of course we are willing to present our poster from this and last year, and are happy to give our floor to the other European presenters.

Please let me know if you're interested via e-mail.

Academic CMS Implemetation Poster

My poster is available in PDF

Innovative CMS Implementation in an Academic Library: The Transition from Static to Dynamic Pages on the Middlebury College Library Web Site

Executive Dashboards Poster (Joe Lamantia)

Thanks to all for a great summit experience. In return, I fear I have only a modest poster to offer :)

For those who requested a copy of my poster on using simple building blocks to create exeuctive dashboards, the pdf version is available for download from my site.

IA Summit Redux - SF Bay Area

Want to turn more people onto IA or the ideas at the Summit? Miss a particular session and kicking yourself over it? Live in the San Francisco Bay Area? Fear not!

Lane Becker, Peter Merholz, and I have been chatting about having another IA Summit Redux in the San Francisco Bay Area, similar to last year. The Redux is basically a mini-version of the IA Summit, with area speakers re-presenting their stuff to a local audience (for free). Last year it was an all-day Saturday session at Hot Studios. This year it will be at Adaptive Path (go-go AP Partners!), date and time TBD. We will be contacting area speakers one-to-one, but this is to put the idea out there. If you are not a speaker from the SF Bay Area but might be in town sometime in the late March to early April range, drop me a line and we'll see if we can't work you into the schedule as well.

I know David Heller has expressed interest in doing a NY Summit Redux. I encourage the IAs in any geographical area to try and pull this off. It was pretty fun last year.

BJ Fogg Talk Question

In BJ Fogg's plenary, he showed slides of a device that tracks your fitness and the associated website. I was in the way back, and lost my notebook, so was wondering if anyone out there has the name of the device/website that he referred to.

StUX - integrating IA deliverables in a web application development methodology

In time, this will appear on the regular IA Summit website, but for now a PDF version of the slides (1.73MB) can be found on my blog:

StUX - integrating IA deliverables in a software development methodology

Feedback is welcome, and I'll be happy to explain elements if requested. Just not in the next week, because I am going on a (well-deserved, thank you) 1-week snowboard holiday.

EZSort

Someone at the conference asked me about EZSort - IBM's software to evaluate card sorting results. (I forget who asked, so I am posting here.)

It is not longer available - sorry. Donna has more info here - http://www.maadmob.net/donna/blog/archives/000598.html

I.A. Slam 2005

We had another great Slam this year, with about 45 participants and one winning team. Congratulations to Team Orange (names do not correspond to the photo, sorry!): Matthew Milan, Matt Leacock, Chris Farnum (not pictured), Mike Lee, Jess McMullin, Tony Byrne, Prentiss Riddle, and Sacha Jerabek for their winning entry, "It's OK to Indulge!"

Thanks to Mike Lee for the amazing photos. Erin Malone also posted some wonderful photos of the IA Slam to the flickr photo blog.

This year we asked the teams to provide an information architecture to facilitate a merger situation: the big box value-conscious retailer Bal*mart had purchased the legendary service-oriented apparel retailer Fordstrom, and was looking to leverage their existing supplier agreements and customer loyalty to monetize the seamless integration of customer experience and merchandise value across multiple channels. (Is that enough bizspeak for you, Dave?)

I'd like to join the other members of the IA Slam production team (Eric Reiss, Matthew Fetchko, and Chris Chandler) in thanking all of you who participated this year. What we get out of the IA Slam is directly related to what you get out of it, and we're grateful that your energy and enthusiasm continue to inspire us to greater heights (or depths?)

We've already begun considering ideas for next year's proposal, and we'd welcome any feedback you'd like to send us. You can post it here, for everyone's viewing and response, or you can send it directly to us at lynnboyden (at) gmail.com. We can't guarantee we'll incorporate your suggestions, but we'll certainly read them, and almost certainly argue about them.

Thanks to everyone, and congratulations again to Team Orange!

Dan Brown's Posters

I received some nice comments on my posters and several people asked for copies. You can download PDFs from my site. Thanks for a great Summit!

Job with Amazon

Amazon.com is looking for an experienced Information Architect to be a part of the Amazon Usability Team. If you have a fair amount of experience in the field, like to work on diverse projects and want to help shape the future of Amazon, send us your resume! Check the link associated with this post to view a description of the position (User Experience Specialist, #04-012214). Please submit your resume via our web form, and email a copy to raina@amazon.com. Thanks, we’re looking forward to hearing from you.

Beep's thoughts

In style with Jesse's entry for the 5-minute maddness (I think) I am posting my notes about the Summit on my blog:

Result of IA Summit: 22 pages of notes, 400 friends

See you next year!

Nice Work if You Can Get It: Support Group

So, I've met a few more people who are interested in getting into the field who are not already employed as IAs, and we enjoyed discussing the challenges we have faced along the way and encouraging each other in meeting our goals.

I've created a Google Group to continue this warm, supportive conversation and invite any one interested to join and participate -- including those who do not belong to ASIST or the IA Institute, or who were not at the Summit.

This is a safe place to ask really dumb questions of other floundering hopefuls, and to provide support in a collegial setting.

Join or view at:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/iaNeophyte

Or send an email to:
iaNeophyte@googlegroups.com

Thanks,
Sonya M. Smith Wong
sonya.smithwong (at) gmail.com
IA Neophyte (from the Greek for "newly planted")

I've also just set up a blog, but I haven't posted yet... soon...

http://www.ianeophyte.typepad.com/

Why Amazon is not enough

For those that are interested in my presentation, including the in-depth speaker notes, you can now download it. Thanks to everyone who came and 'got it' -- and especially to everyone who hung around during and afterwards to chat. Thomas Vander Wal is talking about starting up list to discuss this, so keep in touch!

Summit session summary

Well, sessions are finished and only the keynote and five-minute madness are left. Here's a summary of some of my favourites:

• Most fun: The IA Slam
• Most personally interesting: Grant Campbell - IA and Alzheimer's disease
• Most energetic: Dan Willis - Evangelism 101
• Most practical: Yahoo! team - Implementing a pattern library
• Most honest: Lorelei Brown: 10 Giant Mistakes
• Most forward thinking: Brett Lider - Why Amazon is not enough
• Freakiest (in a nice way): Clifton Evans - Experience Cards