My Voice and the IA Summit

I’ve been thinking about the experience I had chairing the Information Architecture Summit. The event has been key to me throughout my career. I got involved in Septemeber of 2008 because I was called to help Samantha Bailey with the 2009 conference. She needed to know that her in process work chairing the event was going to be left in reliable hands. I took that responsibility on and due to that, had the honor of being the volunteer in charge of curating the event in 2010. In retrospect, I wanted to share some of my thoughts.

CHOICES TO BE MADE

As the chair, I was empowered to make decisions. These are the some of the things I decided:

1) Most of the conference speakers are amongst us. They are our colleagues and they are sharing to help all of us grow.

There has been much talk about how the conference needs to be one track. Well, I remember the days when it was one track and the thing is it’s not TED. This is a practitioner conference.

That does not mean we shouldn’t try it. But consider this…Isn’t thinking about how many tracks first sort of backwards? Content first. Forms follows content. (Maybe this is what the content strategists are trying to tell us….)

An example from the planning this year –  the conference was originally 3 tracks. We got so many great submissions, I made a game time call to add a track. We had the content. Why restrict it based on a notion of the format?

2) Keynotes & Plenaries

I outlined goals for the keynote and the closing speakers. I had an archetype in my mind of how I wanted the keynotes to impact the event. I then searched for people who met my criteria. I sought out lots of advice as well and got assistance from past IA Summit conference chairs and advisors.

Dan Roam

On day 1, Dan Roam painted the picture.

For the first day keynote, I wanted the kind of person that would lift the attendees up and provide a combination of forward thinking and orthogonally related value.

One person I was really excited about getting to speak was robotics professor Cynthia Breazeal but she was not available.

Many lists were shared with the advisors – and then Dan Roam‘s name came up……that clicked. I knew he would be very engaging and he would relate to the audience in a way that would fit within the framework of the event and provide value to the attendees.

Listen to Dan’s talk.

Richard Saul Wurman

Richard Saul Wurman – Where the heck did he come from?

RSW came to us through the people in the community. Dan Klyn submitted a proposal to have a session with RSW. When I saw it I contacted Dan right away to find out more about this. Through several conversations a plan was hatched and RSW was coming to speak on the second day of the three day event. Symbollically this was important to me because one of the things he always talks about is “the spaces in between”. The opinions of his appearance at the event were varied. He caused much discussion and people were either very happy or very upset about the things he said and the manner in which he delivered those messages. BUT-he is ‘the guy’ who wrote the INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE book. So there’s that. You know, history? As the event chair, I didn’t think that kind of serendipity should be ignored. So we made it happen.

Listen to RSW’s talk.

Whitney Hess

How and why I chose Whitney Hess as the closing speaker.

I saw Whitney speak at the IA Summit in Memphis. I was never more inspired by someone at an Information Architecture related event than her. She made me want to do better work. She inspired me to think more deeply about it each day. That was the person I wanted speaking to everyone just before they left the conference that I led. The goal was inspiration. Sure it’s esoteric, but I think energy is essential to push us through challenges. Isn’t that part of what these conferences should provide? She brought that to the event in a way that nobody else could have.

Listen to Whitney’s talk.

3) The Theme

Once the keynote speakers were in place and the proposals were chosen, we had a schedule. I felt the keynotes presented a trifecta of varied and appropriate personalities to frame the event. This trifecta was part of a whole story about my thinking around the theme.

It was a two part theme:

I believe what I said to open the event sums up why I chose the theme.

“Why “This one Goes to 11?” It’s a cultural reference and it aides us in building connections. Connections to each other strengthen our community. These connections are strengthened even further when we come together and meet in person to share, listen, collaborate and hopefully disagree.  When we come together we inevitably have those hallway conversations. Every year that I have attended the IA Summit, I’ve heard people say that exact phrase, ‘the best conversations happen in the hall.’ But those hallway conversations have context when we gather, they are fueled by the input we experience and a continuation of the discussion.”

• Dan Roam helped us think about communicating visually.
• RSW spoke to us about getting out of the notion of thinking about the ‘modality’ so much.
• Whitney reminded us that anyone can at anytime be a hero for the user and that great ideas are just that – ideas. We need to work with the people that build the ideas to make them real.

THE PERSONAL TOLL

I was a volunteer. Since I helped Samantha with the 2009 IA Summit, I was at it for 20 months. It took many hours every week to make sure things were pushing ahead. Events like this tend to have lots of opinions without manpower behind them. When people offered advice, I did what I could to balance the value of the idea and the lack of resources. In the end, I’m pretty happy with all that we got done.

I started getting help from Abby Covert around October 2009. Her contribution was essential. We would not have gotten across the finish line without her. We reached out to people through Twitter and got more help. Lots of people contributed to the event and it would not have been the same without those contributions. I am grateful for every single person who helped.

NEXT YEAR

The thing that excites me the most about what happened this year is the fact that Livia Labate, the 2011 chair, is getting help. People are reaching out and sharing great ideas. I think that’s a remarkable outcome. Who could ask for more.

MY VOICE

Somehow in the process of all of this, I have felt oddly silenced by the experience. It might be due to the fact that I was focused on performing the role of conference chair as a way of exercising leadership and I have not yet identified a new goal. It might be related to something else. For two years, I didn’t feel it was appropriate for me to give a talk at the event because I was the chair and it would be inappropriate for the chair to take that opportunity from someone else. So even though I was able to orchestrate it, I was really only viewed as the person giving the announcements. It put me in a position that took me by surprise and I had an interesting revelation. Organizers are not seen as thought leaders but rather administrators. And in general administrators don’t have a voice because they are busy doing things behind the scenes.

I think that’s where my voice went. I started to respond to others because they had an assumption about me. As I’m slowly recovering from this, I’ve begun to get my voice back. One of the first things I felt should be shared out loud were the reasons behind my choices which were intentional not accidental or administrative.

SOME ADVICE

I learned so much working on the event. Here are some of the most valuable lessons that came out of it for me:

• When you take on something bigger than you, understand it will consume you
• Let it guide you as much as you intend to guide it
• Leave room for serendipity
• Have a plan, but be willing to adjust
• Great ideas are plentiful, dependable volunteers are rare – discern the difference quickly
• Grow a thick skin

I want to thank the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) for presenting the IA Summit throughout the years. They are the sponsoring organization and the people there do all they can to support us. I enjoyed my time working with them as a volunteer.

And on to IA Summit 2011 in Denver.

View my photos from the IA Summit on Flickr.

Almost There

I’ve had a second job for awhile. It’s a volunteer job. I’m on year two of co-chairing the IA Summit. We almost have the program ready this year. It’s been a long road but I think we’ve pulled together a great event that people are going to get value from. Working at my second job has definitely taken valuable blogging time this year, so I’m glad to see that I’m managing to push both forward at the moment. New habits for a new year, I guess.

So soon, the program will be live with registration, this is the Christmas morning anticipation I missed out on this year.

In Honor of Two Great Men

Two of the most influential educators in my life left this mortal coil in 2009. Professor James Gremmels and Dr. Raymond Lammers. My English and Theater professors at the University of Minnesota, Morris, MN.

I took a class my freshman year of college that the two of them co-taught. It was a critical thinking class topically based on Theater and English.

It was one of the most important and transformative experiences of my life. However, it was not just that class that I have to thank them for the gifts of the educators in our life are vast.

Raymond J. Lammers

Dr. Lammers always had faith in me. He pushed me. He challenged me. He made me feel that I could be great. I was encouraged to dream but also to work to make that dream come true. He instilled in me a sense of the discipline it takes to truly make your creative vision come true.

James C. Gremmels

Professor Gremmels was important in a different way. I worked with him at the old time letter press. We would spend hours setting type and printing on an old fashioned printer. His patience during those hours and his guidance taught me that life was not always going to go my way. I had to work with it. His teaching was also very important. His classes were filled with his love and energy of the subject. He breathed all kinds of life into old text and his love of Moby Dick gave me a perspective on the work of Melville that came from a scholar who loved his work.

In honor of all the people that make a difference in your life, I am grateful to both of these great men for the gifts they gave to me. I honor them by remembering them.

And a Happy New Year

Of course I had to get a blog post in before the end of the year. I thought I would do this instead of sending out the holiday letter. The holiday letter is a good tradition as it makes you sit down and review the past year.

The big trend I resisted this year with regard to blogging was the fact that people kept saying, ‘people don’t blog, they micro-blog now.’ I was resistant. I kept saying, ‘it’s not true!’ Well, it happened to me. I saw my behavior change. I used Twitter more and more – pretty much daily – and left my blog behind more often than I would have liked. But this is a guilt free zone, I’m mainly just observing the behavior.

The year was full of lots of adventure. It was a year of planning. We created plans for a house remodel. I created plans for the next IA Summit in Phoenix. I created plans for how I want to grow with EightShapes. I created plans for how I want to grow my photography work. On all fronts things have moved forward. It’s been kind of insane-but that is life and it’s about living it.

January was a big month. We started Gumption, LLC. After one year of being a co-owner, it’s been easy to see that we should have done this a long time ago. Even though I took a job with EightShapes later in the year, I’m still part of Gumption doing my photo work.

February was spent planning and preparing for the IA Summit and lining up all kinds of speaking sessions for the spring. It was a big year for ‘social media’ and I got out there trying to help ‘demystify’ some things for people. It struck me that I was seeing the cycle in play. 10 years ago people were experiencing the same level of overwhelmedness about the Internet. You’ve seen what the past ten years have brought. In ten years, ‘social media’ won’t be something we talk about just another way that humans connect.

March was the big IA Summit. Memphis was the city. Graceland was the fun activity. The rest was all about meeting peers, colleagues, co-conspirators and coming together to learn and share. The Peabody hotel in Memphis was a beautiful and amazing place. It allowed all the IA people to gather in the lounge before and after dinner and during breaks. It was an amazing experience to be on the other side of the event as well as I stepped in to help Samantha Bailey who was the 2009 IA Summit Chair person.

April was a whirlwind of speaking about social media, supporting clients and recovering from the IA Summit. However, recovery did not last too long as planning for 2010 needed to get started.

May brought on changes as well. A trip to San Fransisco for Google I/O and visiting San Fransisco friends. Another very exciting change: EightShapes offered me a full time job and I officially joined ranks.

June-September – well it was summer and it was as usual a great few months of epic dog walks, long days and all the joys of summer.

In September, after a trip to Chicago to hang out with the lovely and amazing Tesia, I attended the IA  Institute IDEA conference for the first time. It was exciting to finally make it to the event after years of not being able to go. I like the format and found it to be a lovely and intimate setting to meet up with colleagues, learn and discuss.

October brought one of my most exciting events of the year. The Photography Salon that I attend, hosted by local Minneapolis photography artist Wing Young Huie, put on a show. 23 Salon members gathered on a Saturday to hang our work. A week later we gathered and welcomed the public to an opening that brought out over 500 people. The show hung for a month. It was an incredibly important milestone for me in my artistic photography career.

Experimental Alice Photos

November and December brought the rush of holiday and family and crossing things off to-do lists. The end of the year is a marker and it makes us do crazy things for closure, for renewal, to give us a sense of a fresh start.

The end of a year. The end of a decade. I’m looking very forward to the ’10′s.

Happy New Year + New Decade World! Let’s use all this new-fangled fancy technology to do some good in the upcoming decade and beyond. That is my wish for the world.

Peace out.

The significance of 8 in the year of 2008

I tend to get reflective this time of year. I go into hibernation mode and reflect upon the nature of things-usually over the past year. Recently as I was reflecting, I discovered that the number eight had appeared in my life a great deal. Some of 8′s in my life this year include:

• the place i’m spending time now is closely connected to the number eight.
• the phone number of my only place of employment this year had many eights.
• a  baby born to a friend in the 8th month.
• the last deposit to my banking account contained many eights.
• that number has popped up a lot this year.

It is symbolic and i believe i have divined the meaning of its significant appearance in my life this year. Here’s my reading.

• In math, eight is a power of two: my year is ending in a power of two, in my work i am part of a power of two.
• In nuclear physics, eight is the second magic number and in many philosophies and world myths it is the beginning and it is lucky.

That’s how I’m feeling about my life and work right now. Things are at the beginning and many of us are lucky. It’s not great times right now for everyone, I recognize that. I’m not saying let them eat cake. But we have a reason for hope. There are some amazing things happening right now in our world that have the power to make life better for more people than ever before.

8 in 8 ad infinitum. The beginning of lucky.

What things have you noticed in your life this year that might be trying to tell you something? It’s a good thing to think about.

TMI?

I found the fact that more information does not necessarily lead to better decisions interesting.
“Michael Mauboussin of Legg Mason, a fund-management group, cites a study that gave horse-racing handicappers varying amounts of information when ranking horses. The more information they received, the more confident they became about their answers. But the success of their predictions was actually worse when given 40 pieces of information, than when given five.”

Makes you think.

Today’s ToDo List

todo

send emails
have meetings
delete user on computer
pack it all up and go to fedex

done and done

another phase of my life begins and ends

Mahtab’s First Trip to Baltimore

Recently my friend Mahtab and I shared a memory. We were reminded of her 30th birthday in Baltimore. We were both attending the IA Summit and it happened to also be her birthday weekend, so we went out for her favorite, Indian Food.

We found a wonderful little restaurant just down the street from our hotel. I found these pics and thought I’d post for her in honor of the memory. Enjoy the memory, Mahtab.

Shifting Perspectives: Returning from a trip

We were on a long vacation and I’m finally reintegrated back to my ‘real’ life. It’s good to take a break. You need to take a break. You shift perspective, get out of ruts, start doing things differently every day and open your mind just a little bit. I took a break from my digital life. Some call it unplugging.

Besides, my husband was the blogger on our vacation, so I didn’t need to document all of it.

See his posts:

Greetings From Amsterdam
Amsterdam Day 2 – What Do You Mean There’s No Mexico City?
Rotterdam is for (Architecture) Lovers

I did, of course, take some photos.

Amsterdam highlights:

1) Street fries with mayo

2) Rotterdam day trip
3) The houseboat we stayed on
4) Hanging out for 8 days in Europe with friends
5) Dutch chocolate and coffee
6) ART, art and some more art: include Andy Warhol Retrospective and Van Gogh Museum
7) Public Transportation: trams and bikes and trains: oh my!
8) Canals
9) That moody sky
10) Scarves NOT hats
11) Architecture
12) Dutch culture
13) Coca-cola with real sugar (in fact none of the usual processed food suspects had high fructose corn syrup)
14) The cemetery we visited
15) Lots of walking followed by soaking in the hot tub.We returned last Tuesday, November 6th. It took me until Saturday night to recover from the jet lag. But now I am recovered, rested, recharged and reflecting back on the satisfaction of a shifted perspective.

On Windmills

I’m taking a trip at the end of the month to the Netherlands. I was doing a little research and came across this article, which included the following,

“A spiritual visit to the countryside. Windmills are worthy objects of artistic attention, as Rembrandt found. (The windmill was said to be his muse.) De Kat, the last remaining wind-powered color mill in the world, produces “antique pigments” from dyewood. “

I’ve always had a real affinity for windmills. I get to see more of them now then when I was growing up as they line the border between Minnesota (where I live) and South Dakota (where I go to see my mother, sisters, brother-in-laws, and nephews).

Not only have I always felt they were beautiful and serene. It’s also been shown that they are good for us. Too bad the fair residents of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket don’t agree.