After posting to peterme.com about how I’d like to see more tools available for the IA community , I got an email from Lisa Chan from Stanford saying that she was also looking into creating a Search Log Analyser, and that if I was going to be working on one, why don’t we work together! This is really cool, I love how the Internet allows things like this to happen. I am here in Perth, WA, knowing all of 2 other IAs personally, and yet I will now be collaborating with another IA from one of the largest Universities in the US to build a tool to help all IAs.

Aim:

Provide a collection of resources which will help Information Architects to educate potential and existing clients about the importance and relevance of Information Architecture and strategy.

Contents of Collection:

• Diagrams
• Quotes
• Statistics
• Case Studies/Examples
• Online Resources

A search facility would be available, allowing you to hunt down certain things, as well as all widgets being categorised carefully and fully browsable. I’d like to be able to give everything a “permanent URL” within the collection as well, so that people can link back to it’s entry, and “reference” their resources properly, thus keeping authors happy(er) about the fact that their work is being used by other people in a relatively generic format.

Fortnightly articles/reports posted by Monsieur Guru Nielsen himself. Some of these are pretty good, personally I think some of them are just plain stupid.

An example of taking things too far: in the most recent alertbox , Nielsen extrapolates his calculated statement that the companies he studied which would “spend $3,042 per employee annually to cover time spent on the sixteen tasks we measured” to mean that if we improved intranets to the best ones they saw in their tests, we would “save the world economy $1.3 trillion per year”… come on dude, seriously. You so can’t make that assumption.

I have decided that in the spirit of the dot-bomb, I should outsource some of my normal, daily operations. I am not talking about business, I am talking about life.

What it really comes down to is that I don’t have time to do everything that I’d like to do, and there is even more that I would like to do, and in fact soon will be doing! To this end, I realised that it would be worth listing out everything that takes up time in a normal day/week of my life, and analysing what, of that list, can be outsourced to someone else (no doubt at a price).

Just kidding, but I got some details back from Lisa C, and she appears to have some very specialised requirements for her system. I have suggested that it might be better if we work together to develop a “base system” which would include the complete logging functionality, and then she can customise and/or extend the reporting/analysis interface as required.

I think this approach should work quite well, allowing me to collaborate on a logging module, and to refine the database schema, then develop a generic, “useful-across-the-board” analysis interface, which should be capable of being extended easily. Metabase, here I come.

After joining the AIfIA (and paying the membership fee), I have been somewhat disappointed with the response I received from the CELIA idea.

I signed up for the IA Library project with AIfIA, and have suggested that perhaps CELIA could be done as a part of that project, but have received no response. Zero. Nada. Zip.

I think Karl and I are going to start planning it out a little, hopefully I will be able to knock together a simple-ish system which can handle the stuff we would be working with, and that would allow us to get started. I think it’s a really valuable thing, and something that perhaps isn’t as important is the US, because IA is more established, but it sure is important here, where I have met all of about 3 people who even took a punt on what Information Architecture is!

Well, I thought they were silent, turns out I just needed to put the idea of CELIA to the whole AIfIA membership to get a response.

After being sparked on by a discussion on the [aifia-members] list, I posted about CELIA and had some reasonable responses. One of them was from James Robertson, of Step Two , an Australian Knowledge Management and CMS company based in Sydney – so he has offered to be a part of it, and this can be Australia’s biggest contribution to the community yet!

Lisa Chan from Stanford emailed me, wanting to know if we could work together on building a search log analyzing system. I emailed her back with a stack of the details of stuff that I was planning and haven’t heard back… I wonder why not? Maybe she’s taken my ideas and is off building it without me?

UPDATE: I still haven’t heard from Lisa