I have been working on a mindMap that illustrates the kinds of activities, research and technologies that me and my co-workers do in our everyday practice. While I realize that this is somewhat specific to our company and the work that we do I thought it would be interesting to get feedback on it. I hope to refine this as we develop the practice.

So if you have anything that you’d like to share, please comment on Flickr.

Matthew Milan & Sam Ladner

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 28 megs )

A mashup of scenario development and social learning, backcasting is a strategy framework that allows practitioners to successfully conceptualize, scope and structure multiple future states. It also provides a framework for successfully negotiating obstacles and threats to achieving those states. Originally used in the environmental planning field, backcasting has been hacked and refined for use in web strategy discovery activities.

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Systems Thinking, Rich Mapping and Conceptual Models – Matt MIllan & Gene Smith
• Project Touchstones how to bridge competing viewpoints and build vision consensus and innovation – Jess McMullin
• Using Search Analytics To Diagnose What’s Ailing Your Information Architecture – Lou Rosenfeld & Rich Wiggins
• Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds – Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

Matt Milan and Gene Smith introduce Rich Mapping and Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) to information architects. SSM is a holistic problem solving framework that can be used to design and model interactions between organizations, people, environments, products and services.

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 22 megs )

The expected outcome for session attendees will be an understanding of the key tenets of Soft Systems Methodology, how these concepts can be applied “off the shelf” to information architecture problems, and how soft systems thinking could be used to drive the development of new IA tools and practices.

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Backcasting: or how I learned to stop predicting and help my clients – Sam Ladner & Matthew Milan
• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Project Touchstones how to bridge competing viewpoints and build vision consensus and innovation – Jess McMullin
• Using Search Analytics To Diagnose What’s Ailing Your Information Architecture – Lou Rosenfeld & Rich Wiggins
• Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds – Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

[tags]IASummit, IASummit2007, InformationArchitectureSummit, GeneSmith, MattMillan, SoftSystems[/tags]

Jess’s talk from this years Information Architecture Summit. LukeW took some good notes.

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 23 megs )

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Backcasting: or how I learned to stop predicting and help my clients – Sam Ladner & Matthew Milan
• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Systems Thinking, Rich Mapping and Conceptual Models – Matt Milan & Gene Smith
• Using Search Analytics To Diagnose What’s Ailing Your Information Architecture – Lou Rosenfeld & Rich Wiggins
• Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds – Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

This session will explore principles for creating effective project touchstones with a mix of grounding theory based in framing and boundary objects, pragmatic real-world examples, and how-to guidance. By focusing on creating touchstones early in a project, IAs can build buy-in, avoid wasted effort, increase their influence with their teams, and make a more meaningful difference with their work.

[tags]IASummit, IASummit2007, InformationArchitectureSummit, JessMcMullin[/tags]

So what do you do when your company is about to tear up an old telemarketing office to make way for a new floor of developers… you hold a BarCamp that’s what.

We are going to do a more specialized BarCamp this time one whose focus is on enterprise development and solutions.

So if you are in the Toronto area and are sick of holiday cheer come out and join us for some inperson knowledge sharing.

Check out the wiki to sign up and for more details.

… oh and ok-cancel rules.

The only thing that I’d like to comment on is ICT Toronto’s completely naive views on offshoring. How can they support a firm like IBM (not that IBM isn’t cool) offering consulting services in Toronto when their blended rate is supported by offshore development. Native Toronto firms will need to outsource to compete with these large American, offshoring firms and ICT Toronto should help Toronto firms establish relationships possibly by starting sister city relationships.

[tags]cluster, creativecluster, Ontario, talent, technology, Toronto[/tags]

That is how Torcamp organizer David Crow introduced himself at the beginning of the first Torcamp. You wouldn’t think so from the excellent event, in fact I think that he gave the Toronto Software community the sweet lovin’ it terribly needed.

David (agent provocateur smooth operator) and the Toronto software community sittin’ in a tree…
You know the rest.

Yes it was an excellent event I hope people start to come out for the smaller events as well as the larger ones. If you’d like to get some more event info review the postings on the Google Group. If you like to know about future events please join the group and we can start to have these events more frequently.

Bryce promised the some people that he would post our presentation on the importance of VISION. There are two versions this time there is a 46 meg Flash video file that will load in a popup and the 25 meg Windows Media file that is actually much higher quality because I can’t figure out if Flash video has variable bit rate encoding…yet.

Bryce and I received a lot of good input from the presentation and we hope to make updates to it as well as create our PowerPoint Vision Template soon. I also found a better version of the swing cartoon.

Technorati Tags: TorCamp, Toronto, BarCamp