• Stephen P. Anderson – product strategy and design consultant
• Christian Crumlish – Curator of the Yahoo! design pattern library, and co-author of the upcoming book Designing Social Interfaces
• Jeff Dachis – CEO, Dachis Group and cofounder of Razorfish
• Erin Malone – Principal, Tangible UX, and co-author of the upcoming book Designing Social Interfaces
• Leisa Reichelt – UX designer and researcher, currently working on the UX for Drupal 7
• Christina Wodtke – Principal Product Manager at LinkedIn, and co-author of the book Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web
• Luke Wroblewski – Director, Product Ideation and Design, Yahoo!
• … and many others!

There will also be a pre-conference workshop on September 14 led by Nathan Curtis of EightShapes; this promises to be an excellent opportunity to learn how to craft effective deliverables from one of the world’s top experts in the field.

Design for the social web is one of the hottest areas in UX today. I encourage you to register today to attend IDEA 2009! (BTW, you can take advantage of special Early Bird pricing if you register before August 15. Update: early bird pricing has been extended til August 22!)

Note: because of previous personal and professional commitments, I’m unfortunately not going to be able to travel to IDEA this year. However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go! :)

This day-long workshop, which will be led by Andrew Hinton, Joe Lamantia, Livia Labate, and Matt Milan, will provide tools and techniques that will help UX designers grow as professionals in these trying times. According to Andrew, the workshop aims to…

… take your IA practice to a higher level of understanding, performance and impact. Learn about contextual models and scalable frameworks, design collaboration tactics, and how to wield more influence at the “strategy table.”

It sounds very exciting and incredibly relevant for our current context. I think it’s going to be terrific, and would sign up for it even if I weren’t part of the Institute’s leadership team. :)

The Summit will be held in Memphis, TN from March 20-22, and the workshop will be held on the 18th of March. Visit the workshop page for more info, and to register. I look forward to seeing you there!

A few months ago, I started a project within the IAI board of directors to help us hone the organization’s vision. As a longtime member of the IAI, I was missing some of the verve of the early days when it felt like a new field was being born?one that would change the world?and our organization would be its midwife. I felt that somewhere along the line we’d lost track of why we were doing things to focus on what we were doing, and that re-stating our vision could help bring us back on track.

We have a natural resistance to pinning this down because the word “vision” evokes tacky posters wallpapered over gray and tan cubicles. However, it doesn’t have to be like that! Some visions are incredibly energizing and can lead to great things (e.g. “A computer on every desk and in every home.”) The objective of this project is to develop such a vision for the IAI. The “how” is something that we’ve struggled with; we started by having a series of discussions with our board of advisors, and then surveying them to get their individual hopes and expectations for the profession. It was a good start, but clearly not enough.

The impact we can achieve using online tools and conference calls is limited. Creating a powerful vision is an activity that requires the special mind meld that can only occur when people meet face to face in an isolated setting. Inspired by the prospects of such a meeting (being discussed now in the IAI mailing list), and in the hopes that this will help spark a broader discussion, I share with you here the initial “call to action” posted on the internal IAI board’s Basecamp site earlier this year. Your thoughts are most welcome.

The IAI Vision

What is this project about?
This project aims to develop a compelling vision statement for the IAI, and a strategy (and roadmap) for the implementation of this vision.

That previous sentence makes this exercise sound much more bureaucratic than it is — this is an incredibly exciting opportunity for us to grow the IAI and have a more meaningful impact!

Why do we need to do this?
Because most of us are passionate about IA, and believe that it will change the world for the better. Unfortunately that passion is not being accurately conveyed, represented or harnessed by the Institute.

We see signs of this in our members’ confusion about our role vis-a-vis other professional organizations, comments made by our advisors in our last meeting, comments made by Glenn Harvey [1] in his report to the board, the low turnout during our last annual members meeting, and the (relatively) low posting frequency in the IAI Members mailing list.

We all want the IAI to grow. The vision will help us grow in a coherent way, and will make it clear to all of us why we must grow. It is a critical part of our growth strategy.

But don’t we have a vision already?
Our current business plan has a section titled Mission and Vision, which defines the IAI’s current mission: “The IAI is a global organization that supports individuals and organizations specializing in the design and construction of shared information environments.”

The business plan also presents a 2-year goal of making “Information Architecture” a household term, and details our positioning, strengths, and opportunities.

I suspect these statements contain the seeds of our vision, but they are not the vision per se.

What is a “vision”, after all?
It is our shared understanding of how Information Architecture — and the IAI — will change the world, and what we’re willing to do to achieve that change. In other words, the vision provides an answer to the question “Why does the IAI exist at all?”

What are the outcomes of this project?
Like the word implies, visions are nebulous things. The primary outcome of this exercise is a vision statement, which is another term that sounds more bureaucratic than it should be. (I personally prefer “elevator pitch” or “mantra”.) The vision statement captures the vision in a form that can be easily transmitted from one mind to another. It should be clear, memorable, and exciting/energizing. We should also strive to make it infectious.

WE ARE CHANGING THE WORLD — IT SHOULD BE EXCITING!

Litmus test: if at the end of the process we are squirmy about printing out the vision statement and posting it in our cubes for the world to see, we haven’t done a good job.

Litmus test: if you tell it to your sister/brother/father/etc., and receive a puzzled look, we haven’t done a good job.

Litmus test: if you tell it to a neophyte IA, and s/he doesn’t ask you where s/he can sign up, we haven’t done a good job.

(more litmus tests?)

Once we’ve captured our vision in a statement, we need to convey it to the world (or at least, to our constituency). This doesn’t mean we put up a traditional “mission/vision” page in the website — it means that we make tangible changes to what we are doing and how we are doing it. In other words, the vision should help us make decisions about which projects to pursue, how to pursue them, and how we communicate about what we’re doing. We need to plan out how we’re going to do this.

“We communicate with passion — and passion persuades.” – Anita Roddick

Found a great example of a corporate vision in today’s NY Times:

Volvo’s 2020 Vision: The Injury – Proof Car

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-volvo-safety.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Seven words! And they reveal so much: what they stand for/care about, what they believe they can achieve, the timeframe, etc. It’s a futuristic concept, yet totally grounded in the needs of their clients. I bet it’s also very energizing to Volvo designers and engineers.

Notes:
[1] Glenn Harvey was the first candidate we engaged for the role of Executive Director. He prepared a report for the board on his perceptions of the current state of the organization from the perspective of someone outside the field.

With that in mind, I went looking for a site that would allow anyone to propose alternative definitions to a word, comment on them, and vote for (or against) any of them. I couldn’t find anything like this, so I slapped together a small web app:

http://thatword.net/word/is/information_architecture

I’ve primed the well with four “classic” definitions of the term information architecture. You are welcome to add more, and to comment and vote on the ones already there.

By the way, the platform is abstracted so that anyone can propose and define any word, not just IA. To get started, visit thatword.net and search for a word or term, if it’s not already been defined you’ll be prompted to propose a definition.

For what it’s worth, I’m not really sure we can come up with the “best” definition solely by voting for it, so this goes out to the world with tongue planted in cheek. I hope you have fun with it—it’s meant to be more a diversion than anything serious.

(The app probably has bugs lurking, given that it was slapped together with duct tape and chewing gum over a few days. Please email me if you have any trouble with it.)

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.

-more->
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.

This year’s venue (Miami) is often referred to as “The Capital of Latin America” because of its strong cultural and economic ties to the region. While travel to the US has become considerably more difficult since 9/11, Miami remains a convenient location for many Latin Americans traveling to the US. Given the increasing profile of IA in our region, and this convenient location, I’m expecting to see a large number of Latin American IA’s at this year’s Summit.

In any case, if you’ve never been to a Summit, and are on the fence about it, I strongly encourage you to go. This is one of the best opportunities to meet and learn from some of the most experience IA practitioners in the world.

Self-serving ad: I’m helping organize this year’s IA Institute preconference workshop: Becoming a leader – from IA to business and beyond. We have an incredible program: Christopher Fahey, Margaret Hanley, Harry Max, Karen McGrane, and Josh Rubin will be exploring the relationship between Information Architecture and leadership. If you aspire to a position of leadership ? in any capacity ? you cannot miss this workshop.

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I think this is the first time that most of the candidates to the board come from outside the US… it’s an encouraging sign of growth! Knowing these folks, and the current board, I think there are great things afoot at the IAI.

Although the class was small, and the time slot quite late (8pm – 10pm), I think it was very cool—the students really got into it, and by the end of the evening Harold had them do a quick and dirty cardsort/sitemapping exercise.