Nov 03, 2002: The Big News

Bloug's been quiet of late. One excuse: an incredibly stupid travel schedule assembled by yours truly (greetings from Atlanta!). Much more interesting excuse: spending lots of time as part of a great team that's been developing the first and only professional association of information architects. The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture officially launches Monday!

Yes, the name's a bit mysterious. In a nutshell, Asilomar is a conference center near Monterey, California; an incredibly stunning (and reasonably priced) place for a weekend retreat to hash over what it means for information architects to organize. And yes, we're calling it an institute rather than a society or association; "institute" seems to carry less baggage.

Why am I bothering? And why should you care? Because:

• The AIfIA presents an opportunity to create a new kind of professional association, taking advantage of information technology to deliver relevant and innovative services cheaply and effectively to a burgeoning global professional community.
• It will add a degree of legitimacy to the profession, and frankly, many of us are tired of other, established fields not taking information architecture seriously.
• It will provide infrastructure to enable groups of volunteers to do wonderful, amazing, and useful things to improve the profession.
• It's fun to collaborate with other information architects, something most of us don't get to do every day.
• The information architecture profession will continue to grow, and an association of some sort is therefore an inevitability. Many of us want to be a part of it, and are impatient; so why wait?

Maybe a simpler way to look at all this is that we're building on many of the ideas put forth at info-arch.org, but now we have an actual (and incorporated) organization to carry them forward.

So that's my pitch to you. Please spread the word, volunteer, and become a charter member (only US$30 the first year). And please visit the site (www.aifia.org) and consider what we're trying to do. If you see something you like, get involved; if you see stuff you don't like, this is your organization and you can fix what needs fixing.

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Comment: David Rush (Nov 5, 2002)

Interesting conversation going on at Metafilter about www.aifia.org

http://www.metafilter.com/comments.mefi/21365

Comment: Jeff Stuit (Nov 7, 2002)

Lou - congrats and much thanks for the hard work you and the others involved have put into launching this!

OK - why was the institute named after a conference center in Monterey?

Comment spam has forced me to close comment functionality for older entries. However, if you have something vital to add concerning this entry (or its associated comments), please email your sage insights to me (lou [at] louisrosenfeld dot com). I'll make sure your comments are added to the conversation. Sorry for the inconvenience.