Euro IA Summit 2006 themes

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.