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Thoughts on the Open IAI initiative

Given my status as a current IAI director, I’ve been hesitant to write publicly about the Open IAI initiative. Three of the candidates in the IAI election are closely associated with the initiative, and I don’t want to appear to be favoring them over any of the others.

However, I believe the initiative is raising some important points that are worth discussing. I’ve been following the discussions and also participated in the Open IAI discussion last Tuesday evening. So to a degree I’m already involved. Also, Russ asked me to share the notes I took during that meeting, and I think that’s fair—especially since we’re talking about being more transparent. I’ll post those notes here along with some thoughts on the initiative and what it means for IAI.

My experience on the board

Before I get into it, I want to set the context for my comments by telling you about my experience thus far. A little over a year ago I was nominated and elected to the IAI Board of Directors. I’d been a member of the Board of Advisors prior to that, and had actively participated in the calls and events at the Summit, etc. So while I had little direct experience with the director role, I knew the other folks on the board and had a rough idea of what the board did. (By the way, I consider it a privilege to have been able to serve with the board thus far. These are all top folks!)

What little I did know about the board before I was on it: I knew that it met periodically, and that it looked after a series of volunteer-driven initiatives (mentoring, events, the website, etc.) that are published on the IAI site. I knew the board was responsible for managing the “business” side of the IAI and published a yearly annual report and a monthly email newsletter on their activities. I also knew that as a non-profit organization, some board members had legal responsibilities. (I’m baffled when I hear people say they don’t know what the board does. These things were obvious to me, a non-English speaker living as far as possible from the bright center of the galaxy.)

The one thing I didn’t know about the director role is exactly how much time and effort it required. Coordinating the IAI events (the area I’m responsible for)—IDEA, in particular—turns out to be incredibly time consuming and stressful. (I must highlight the fact that most of the ground work is done by a dedicated group of volunteers and two paid IAI staffers.) As an attendee of these events in the past, I’d been oblivious to all that went on behind the scenes. Now I know better, and am impressed and appreciative every time I go to a successful event.

The other director roles also require a lot of work, and it’s worth noting that this work is done voluntarily by busy professionals who also have careers and families to attend to. (“Does it need to be like this?” is a valid question. I’m just reporting on the situation as it exists now.) I mention this because I was surprised by the level of misunderstanding I heard in Tuesday’s discussion about what it is the board does and how much work goes into running the organization. I felt some of the comments made during the call were flat-out unfair and uninformed, and wanted to set the record straight before digging into richer soil.

Open IAI

We have a lot of work to do to get the IAI where we want it to go. I am thrilled with the level of energy and enthusiasm that has built up around this election. I hope we can keep the momentmum going after the votes have been tallied. For the record, and for the sake of transparency, I’m sympathetic to the Open IAI’s objectives. I like the platform that Livia, Russ, and Matt have crafted, and I hope we can continue to work together on these issues regardless of the outcome of the election. (I suspect any of the other candidates running for the board would find little to disagree with in the platform.)

However, while it’d be great for some facets of the organization be managed more openly (coordinating volunteer efforts lends itself naturally to an open-source-style methodology, for example), I think it’s unrealistic to think a “radical transparency” model can be applied to all aspects of the organization. We can probably all agree that things like our bank account information shouldn’t be made public.

Even open source projects need to keep some information confidential. For example, the Drupal website is currently undergoing a major redesign. Leisa Reichelt, who was a very active participant in Tuesday’s discussion, is one of the designers working on this project; she even highlighted Drupal as a model of openness to emulate (rightly so, in my opinion) during the call. However, there are aspects of her hiring into that project that were managed confidentially—with good reason. See the comments in the announcement for details on how the process was managed and the reaction of the Drupal community. (Takeaway: it’s great that the process itself is being discussed, but they’d be wrong to publish details that could hurt their providers and partners.)

That said, my main concern is that this discussion about openness and transparency could be distracting us from the main question we need to be addressing right now: what is the IAI’s vision and its role in society?

When I was running for the board, I wrote the following as part of my position statement:

Our work adds real value to people’s lives. However, most folks—especially outside of North America and Europe—seem to not be aware of it yet. The flipside is that more people than ever are “doing IA” around the world, but many of them don’t know it; perhaps they call it something else, or don’t know what to call it at all. They are starting from scratch, in many cases reinventing techniques we take for granted.

It’s time for IA to be more active in a broader cultural conversation. The IA Institute has a key role to play in helping the profession define and explain itself—to itself and to others—and to grow globally.

12 months on, I’d say this statement was naive. I was assuming that these issues were pretty much settled in North America and Europe, and that people already had a relatively good idea of what IA was and what value it added. I was mistaken. This “broader cultural conversation” hasn’t yet played itself out anywhere in the world—not even in the more developed countries. Most people are still oblivious to what IAs do, and there are still many people practicing IA without calling it that. As I see it, part of the IAI’s mission should be to help clarify this situation. We are supposed to be the profession’s stewards, and frankly we are not doing a good job as “cultural engineers”, helping people understand what IA is about and what value it adds.

So I’m very excited about the energy that’s developed around the Open IAI meme, and am hoping that it’ll help us improve the organization. But I believe that sorting out the organization’s vision is much more important and urgent, and “crowd wisdom” approaches have a poor track record of producing clear visions of this sort. We’re gonna have to answer this some other way, and I suspect that going “more open” will do little to help us in this regard.

Notes from Tuesday’s discussion

Here is, verbatim, the email I sent to the IAI Board of Directors with my impressions of last Tuesday’s discussion. Please let me know in the comments if you feel I misrepresented any of the things that were discussed in the meeting.

I was present during the entire OpenIAI meeting last night. (Christian [Crumlish] was also there for most of the conference.) There was some very valuable feedback, some pie-in-the-sky thinking, and some “armchair quarterback”-type comments. (Don’t be put off by the “no BOD” comment. It was raised only as speculation, like many other questions that came up.) [1]

There was a general feeling at the meeting that the current (and past) BODs have operated as a black box for decision-making, and that little is trickling down to the membership. We asked if people were reading the monthly newsletters, and some folks said they didn’t even know we had a member newsletter.

There is also the feeling that we need to have a more open way for our membership to volunteer and to contribute to the organization; the current infrastructure is too bureaucratic. Some folks in the call were frustrated because they’ve volunteered to help and their requests have gone nowhere.

Leisa Reichelt was especially critical. She seems to feel that the BOA [2] meetings were a waste of time, and that all we do is talk without producing anything. She also said she had volunteered for the IAI Blog project and for local groups, and that neither of them had gone anywhere—she hadn’t heard back from us at all in either of those cases. Leisa provided a very critical foil to the rest of the discussions, which otherwise tended to focus on how things can be improved going forward.

We also talked a bit about the vision for the IAI. It is clear that (at least) the people in the call are not entirely clear on what the organization is/stands for/does/etc. Some of the comments were eerily reminiscent of the concerns I raised with the “Vision” project—it is obvious that this is a major issue that is going to have to be dealt with soon. I think we all agree that this can’t be sorted out online or via the phone, and that we need a F2F meeting.

There were six candidates for the BOD on the call yesterday, and everyone seemed to be in agreement that these are issues that are going to have to be addressed. Given that I was the only current member of the board present at the end of the call, I promised to report back to the board and to see if there were ways in which we could start working to improve things even before the next election.

I’m hoping to discuss this in today’s call. In the meantime, I urge you to read this discussion:

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=23079079486&topic=4831

Many of the candidates for the BOD are involved in this discussion, and are sympathetic to this POV. There are changes coming (for the better, I think), and I think it behooves us to work with these folks to ensure that we do what is best for our membership and for the org.

[1] This parenthetical comment was in response to the notion of eliminating the board of directors, an idea that got relayed back from the meeting to the board before I sent my email.

[2] Board of Advisors, of which Leisa was a member over the past year.

September 11, 2008 | Archived in Information Architecture