Oz-IA/2007

The program schedule is now available.

Saturday is a big day. Registration will open at 7:45am, with tea, coffee, and breakfast croissants. Opening and welcome will be at 8:10am, with the first session kicking off just five minutes later. Each session is 45 minutes long, with a 15 minute break.

This year there will be bottomless urns of tea and coffee in addition to the usual morning/afternoon tea breaks.

Out of consideration of the possible after-effects of Happener’s IA-Beers social networking event on Saturday night, Sunday kicks off a little bit later, the final session is from 4:30pm and like last year is an Open Session with content to be determined by the attending delegates. Use this time to ask presenters extra questions, delve deeper into some tangent, or maybe do a lightning presentation of your own.

Finally, we wrap up by retiring to the bar, where FatDUX has put a wad of FatBUX on the bar.

We’ve sorted through many very fine proposals and had to make some heartbreaking choices as to who didn’t make the cut.

Right now, so far, we have 14 sessions selected. We plan at least another two sessions as well, plus inter-session activities … but we ran out of beer so the program committee was adjourned for the night.

We have presentation sessions covering wikis, tagging, business realities, and user research. Some will be diving deep into their subjects, some will be rollicking frolics, some may even be both at the same time. Did I mention there was beer?

Each of the selected sessions are listed on the Sessions page, with each linked to a session abstract and the presenter’s bio and photo. Each of those pages have comments enabled, so please go ahead and ask your speakers some difficult questions. Especially if they have only a short and mysterious abstract. Who knows, maybe they’ll even quietly update their presentation to include coverage of your question too.

We’ve also got a number of inter-session activities planned, things involving user personas, graded categories, a delphi method-esque card sort, affinity diagramming, a pod-casting Q&A, a trading card game, and brainstorming some cloudy problem. Oooh, mysterious!

We’re still accepting ideas and proposals for inter-session activities, so do let us know.

We’ve received many great proposals which we are now sorting through.

Topics include wikis, deliverables, documentation, faceted browsing, selling IA, optimising page content and structure, some heady deep-thinking matters, some breezy whirlwind introductions to new material, and several case studies … some sessions will be of particular interest to commercial sector practitioners, others of special interest to in-house corporate or governmental … stay tuned this week for more details, plus we’ll (finally!) be opening registrations.

In reading the proposals, one thing I noticed is that while writing abstracts and biographies seem relatively easy (hah!), some are struggling to find the vocabulary to precisely elaborate who their intended audience is. What audience segment best represents you?

Got an idea for a session or activity?

We are now accepting proposals - submit yours today.