Canberra IA Cocktail Hour

So, what makes a relatively normal (if geeky), relatively sensible girl hang out at a bar on a Wednesday night, drinking cider, talking about:
- how and why people put full-stops in metadata fields
- the pros and cons of automatic linking
- what is organisational culture and can you identify it if you are part of an organisation
- how to do the writing to present information a number of ways with a single content source
- whether Jakob Nielsen is helping or harming the usability community…

Why, it was a Canberra information architect’s cocktail hour of course!

Last week, I arranged the first Canberra Information Architect’s cocktail hour.

We had good attendance - 9 people (plus a few apologies). Not bad for pulling names out of my head to invite.

One thing that was really interesting was the range of backgrounds we had. They included:
- librarians
- data managers
- software engineers (with some cognitive science in the mix)
- user-centred designers
- tech writing

We do a range of jobs, and have a range of skills, so we should be able to learn a lot from each other.

We talked housekeeping a bit (which reminds me, I have to set us up a yahoo group), decided on meeting times, and talked a bit about topics for future meetings.

We decided to meet monthly, on the 2nd Wednesday of the month. I have since had to reschedule slightly to the 3rd Wednesday. I hope this still suits.

So, thanks to those who came. I hope to see you next time. I’ll arrange the yahoo group, and will also keep meeting details here and on the IAwiki.