Save the IA Summit! (if it needs saving)
Last year after the IA Summit, I came home feeling energized and inspired, but also somewhat troubled by all the angst that came out of the conference (much, though not all, of it related to JJG’s closing plenary). This year I came back even more energized and inspired. And also delighted and impressed that at least one person, the estimable Richard Dalton, took JJG’s challenge and made something meaningful and valuable from it. And also very pleased that this year’s Summit was mostly angst-free.Okay, so it wasn’t completely angst-free. But I think this year’s angst, even more than last year’s, may lead to a better community and a better IA Summit, or at least that’s my hope. I also hope that I can contribute to that effort. This post is one attempt at doing so.
I started thinking about this stuff after Lou Rosenfeld tweeted that he wasn’t sure that the Summit could survive in its current format, and then suggested a flex track session the next day for interested parties to discuss it. It’s too bad that the impromptu nature of the session meant that not a lot of Summit-goers attended, and few (or no?) first-time attendees were there, though I’d like to think that maybe they were too busy experiencing the Summit to want to pause and talk about its future. A bunch of us—some veterans, some, like me, with three or four Summits to their names, and a few people with less—did show up, though, and the discussion was civil, mostly calm, and somewhat productive; it wasn’t conclusive, but it was an important first step. I very much hope it won’t be the only step, or the only such discussion.
From the perspective of someone who has some experience organizing events (for many years, I helped organize a small-scale music festival—nowhere near as complex as a professional conference, but with some parallels nonetheless), I’m not convinced that the IA Summit is broken; it’s just at a tricky point in its lifecycle, with veterans getting restless and newcomers feeling like their needs aren’t quite being met. There were reports of people not planning to return, and unfavorable comparisons with the IxDA’s Interaction 10 conference, which by all accounts was very worthwhile. But IxDA is at a different point in the affinity group lifecycle from the IA Institute, and certainly from ASIS&T, which technically owns the Summit, so there’s a different kind of excitement about it. Plus, as someone pointed out, Interaction 10 had the backing of the Savannah College of Art and Design, which I’m sure made some of the coordination of the conference easier and helped make it possible to put on such a well-run conference.
And as for people not planning to return, we need to know the reasons for their decisions before assuming that it’s something inherent in the Summit that’s keeping them away. It could be that the Summit is somehow failing to meet their needs, but it’s equally possible that they want to try a different event after years of coming to the Summit, or that their conference funding has been reduced, or that they have travel plans next April. (Or that they’re not enthusiastic about going to Denver for IAS 11 two months after they go to Boulder for Interaction 11, which is the only thing making me consider not going to the Summit next year. But I digress.) Besides, my sense is that the Summit always has an influx of newcomers to help compensate for people who don’t return.
All of that said, though (and there had to be a “but” here, right?), from my attendee/volunteer perspective, there are definitely things that the Summit could do better. Here are some that I heard, along with a few that I thought of myself:
- Single track is the way to go. I talked to a number of people who didn’t even know there were tracks this year, and others who didn’t care which presentations belonged to which track. The tracks just don’t add anything of value to the conference, and they may even contribute to a sense of disjointed all-over-the-place-ness. A theme or organizing principle for each year’s conference, even if it’s a loose one, might help with this. It also might encourage first-time presenters—especially those of us who say “I’d love to give a talk, but I have no idea what to talk about”—to submit presentations. It would also give some focus to an active search for presenters (a suggestion that Jared Spool made that seemed very sensible to me), and might even help prevent the imbalances that sometimes occur in the conference schedule (e.g. three presentations on similar aspects of social media but none on mobile, to use a made-up example).
- People want new voices to be heard, and with so much competition for their conference dollars, they don’t want repetition. There were presentations that I skipped because I’d just seen them at my local IxDA group’s redux of Interaction 10—and if I’d actually gone to that conference, the Summit would have been my third opportunity to see them in the last three months. This raises the larger, and thornier, problem of how to make all the different conferences complementary more than competitive, which is desirable from the perspective of the attendees but—in the absence of a single coordinating organization—difficult to actually pull off. (Sure would be nice if the groups would at least talk to each other, though.) But in any case, the problem of repetition seems easier to solve. Maybe it’s just deciding that x percent of presenters must be first-timers, or maybe if someone has presented a topic at any UX conference within the last six months, they have to have substantially added to or modified the preso in order to present it at IAS. I’m not sure what the exact parameters are, but this is a solvable problem.
- Speaking of newcomers, the lunch topic tables are a nice way to make them feel more comfortable, but more could be done. I went out to dinner with a group on Saturday night, and since we weren’t sure exactly where the restaurant was, we asked a young woman outside the hotel who was wearing a badge that said “Have a question? Ask me!” Turned out she was a Downtown Phoenix Ambassador, and it’s her job to help people find restaurants, or attractions, or whatever they’re looking for. She walked us most of the way to our restaurant, giving us a travelogue of downtown Phoenix as we went, and in addition to thinking that this was an amazing service that more cities should offer, I immediately thought, “This is what the Summit needs: ambassadors.” Our ambassadors would be volunteers, veterans who can help newbies figure out which presentations to attend, how to get on Crowd Vine or find other attendees on Twitter, and just generally what to expect. It wouldn’t have to be a huge effort; just ask some people to step up and be available as needed. The mentoring booth is great, but this could be even more valuable. Consider me the first volunteer.
- Do the research. Look at the years’ worth of post-conference surveys that ASIS&T sends out (and apparently doesn’t share) each year, but beyond that, ask people throughout the year what topics they’re most interested in, or what trends they’re seeing in their corner of the UX universe, or what amazing speakers they’ve seen recently.
- Consider a divorce from ASIS&T. Okay, I’m talking mostly out of my hat here, because I don’t know all of the details of the ASIS&T/IAI relationship. But it seems clear that ASIS&T isn’t providing the kind of support that the Summit needs, and shouldn’t the Information Architecture Institute be the body responsible for the Information Architecture Summit? Yes, it might mean a scaled-back Summit, with fewer speakers and less of a budget, at least at first. (I’m not convinced that would be such a bad thing.) Or it might mean having to charge more for the Summit, but since it’s currently quite favorably priced compared to some of the other UX events, there’s some room for that, I think. The ownership of the Summit seems to fall into a gray area between ASIS&T and the IAI, and that’s clearly broken, even if nothing else is.
I recognize how easy it is to be a Monday-morning quarterback about this stuff, but I’m not saying it to ruffle feathers; I say it because I want to help somehow. I’m willing and eager to volunteer for much more than just introducing speakers or helping with lunch tables (which was the extent of my volunteerism this year). And though I hope that people will comment here with their ideas for improving the Summit, I hope even more that you’ll also share your ideas with the conference organizers. That’s because I still care a great deal about the Summit, and whether or not it’s broken, I’d love to see it be better. What about you?
