Euro IA Summit 2006 themes

Euro IA Summit 2006 mind-map

The second European IA Summit has come and gone. The promised live updates from Berlin weren’t delivered due to the scarcity of power sockets and flaky WiFi (a lesson for the organization of next year’s event, IMHO). I do have a few hundred photos to go through, including the contents of my Moleskine (chaotic mind-maps of each talk, for the real connoisseur.)

All in all, the summit was great. It was nice to meet old acquaintances and make new ones. We had quite a few laughs because of language and cultural differences, which is what a European event is all about I guess.

It was encouraging to see that the number of attendees was considerably larger than last year. The variety of nationalities had also increased I think, which is good of course.

The contents of talks were of a pretty high standard, while presentation skills of the speakers varied widely, as could be expected. It’s a shame when high quality content becomes hard to grasp due to bad presentation, and we had a few of those, but I still respect anyone who had the courage to step up and express their views.

On the way back I created a mind-map of all the big themes I picked up on during the weekend and intend to delve into the main ones over the course of this week in a series of mini-posts. The first one will be on strategy; the follow-ups will cover social search, process & deliverables, involving the client and accessibility.

I’m a European IA

Tomorrow I’m off to the 2nd European IA Summit. This year’s conference will be held in Berlin. That’s great because I’ve never been there until now. I’m planning on doing some mind mapping of talks (inspired by Lars Plougmann) so keep an eye on the Flickr photostream during the weekend. Of course, I hope the organization has managed to get some open WiFi going (last year that was a bit of a problem). Convenient power sockets would come in handy too… See you there, or see you later!