I just returned from this year’s Idea Conference in NYC. Yes, I know, I live in NYC and the conference was in NYC, so I can’t really say I ‘returned’ from the conference, but in many ways I can. Why? Because in the actual conference venue, I had no way of getting online, no way of blogging the event, keeping my inbox from overflowing, etc. etc. In fact, I tried checking email from my phone, but I couldn’t even do that. So, one might ask, was this a bad thing? And, of course, the answer is a definite maybe.

Why it was a good thing that we had virtually zero connectivity at the Conference

If there would’ve been wifi, if I’d be able to blog the even as it was happening, if I’d been able to stay on top of email, to check all the websites that presenters mentioned, then of course, I would probably have missed half the conference. I would have missed Michael Wesch‘s mesmerizing, sometimes heart-wrenching keynote, describing students in modern classrooms to be like prisoner’s in Plato’s Cave, questioning whether or not students are being prepared for the world they are growing up in by today’s schools (as in the students who spend far far more time using Facebook and MySpace than doing their coursework.) I would have missed Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg fantastic one-year-later presentation of their brilliant Many Eyes information visualization site. My favorite, which was both funny and scary, is the visualization showing which words were most commonly used in Alberto Gonzalez’s Senate hearings.

In fact, I would have missed so much of one of the best conferences I’ve attended in some time. Part of what made the Idea Conference such a success for me was the amazing diversity and consistent high caliber of the presenters. A lot of credit for this goes to Peter Merholz, who was the program chair and who very undemocratically hand-picked each of the speakers. Comparing the quality of these speakers to that of, for example, some of the IA Summits, well, there is simply no comparison. But let’s be clear, while this approach certainly has it’s place, a more democratic by-committee model such as that employed by the organizers of the IA Summit also certainly has its place. Otherwise, you’d basically have the same small group of A-listers doing the conference circuit, making it very hard for lesser known people to get a chance to present their ideas. Anyway, I digress. All in all, looking back I’m sort of glad there was no wi-fi (this was not by choice by the way, the organizers very much wanted to be able to do it, but apparently the people at Parsons/New School, where the event was held shut it down), and yet, and yet…

Why it was a bad thing that we had virtually zero connectivity at the Conference

There is simply something very ironic in having an event by and for people who live and breath connectivity, the web, the information ether, to have an event in the heart of Manhattan (granted, NYC is in fact a bit backwards when it comes to connectivity – e.g. you still can’t get reception in the subways, but that’s another matter) and not being able to get online. Oh, actually we were able to get online, but to do that you had to leave the conference and walk around on the street in search of a public hotspot – which you really didn’t want to since you didn’t want to miss the fantastic presentations. And speaking of missing the presentations, even though I said earlier that being able to blog about the presentation during the presentation might have meant missing half of it, well, I think that might only be half true. After all, why do we write things down? Why do students take notes in a class? To record, to remember, to process, and re-process the information through the multiple senses of seeing and hearing and writing it down and thinking about what you’ve written and reading it later. And when you’re doing that while also online, there is that whole added dimension being able to interlink your thoughts with what the presenters are discussing, that sense of immediacy, of getting your ideas and reactions out while they are fresh. Now, writing about the conference in retrospect, well, it just has a completely different feel. Weirdly, it’s bit like dreaming – you better write your dreams down as soon as you wake up, or they are sure to fade away…

I just returned from the New Challenges IA Retreat, which was held at the Edith Macy Conference Center. As the main organizer of the event, I would probably be somewhat biased to say that it was a huge success—but it was a huge success! After arriving late on Friday (we got rear-ended on the highway, and the car that hit the car that hit ours drove off, so suddenly the whole thing turned into a crime scene and oodles of paperwork), I had to call ahead to make sure someone would actually be there. Crystal and the “Philly Van” were there to cover for me. What a relief it was to arrive to a crowd of smiling faces and an amazing dinner, after having gotten lost in the maze of highways criss-crossing Westchester county. It was great to see a lot of familiar faces, like Jorge Arango, Peter Van Dijck, Livia Libate, Wendy Cown and Victor Lombardi (who I rode up with and also had to fill out oodles of paper work at the car accident “crime scen”), as well as several new faces, like Todd Warfel of MessageFirst, and Marcelo and Mary-Lynne from Razorfish.

The IA Retreats have been an ongoing tradition for a few years now, but as far as I know all have been held on the west coast at the Asilomar Campgrounds, a gem of a retreat venue on the Northern California coast. After attending last year’s amazingly great Asilomar retreat, I thought it was time to do this on the east coast, if nothing else for a change of scenery, but also to attract people who may not want to travel all the way across the country for a retreat.

I have to admit I was a bit nervous on Saturday morning.  How would the presentations turn out? Would the fact that the pouring rain was forecast for the entire weekend put a damper on the whole thing? (Part of the reason for picking Edith Macy was all the little winding walkways and outdoor areas, and the thinking that we maybe could hold a session or two outside.) But after a quick welcome talk, and getting the first presentation (“Global IA”) underway, the retreat sort of went on auto-pilot.

One of the things I really love about retreats like this, which sets them apart from larger conferences, is that you’re not really married to whatever schedule you’ve come up with for the event. If you’re at a conference, and there is an interesting presentation, which inevitably leads to discussion afterwards, it equally inevitably gets cut short, because there is another presentation scheduled and people have to clear out of the room. Not so at a retreat. We all attend the same sessions, and being very much aware that IAs tend be of the discussion-intensive ilk, we padded our schedule with about an hour and a half of unscheduled time spread out across each day. By the end of Saturday, every last minute of that padded time had been filled with intense discussions about global enterprise intranets (I mean really global, as in deploying them to offices in virtually every major country on the globe), how to best produce wireframes (I say standards-based, you say drawing-based…), the tantalizing possibilities and elusive pitfalls of applying prototype theory to content management, or navigating Enterprise IA through the unpredictable waters of mergers and acquisitions (and coming out on top.) Even the lunch break was intermingled with a “Women in IA” session, held by Livia (put together after we realized that almost all the presenters that had been selected were male.) While we were having drinks in the lounge that evening (we were supposed to be out on the patio, but that was out due to the unending downpour), several people came up to me and said they were really enjoying the retreat. I can’t even begin to express how nice it was to get those compliments. After all, putting together a retreat like this was a much bigger undertaking than I had expected. But I am so glad we made it happen.

Peter Merholz, the current president of the Information Architecture Institute, which sponsored the retreat, has said that one of his major goals is to place a greater emphasis on events. Just as last year’s retreat at Asilomar was a huge inspiration for me, I hope people attending this year’s event found it equally inspiring and go on to organize events of their own, and that the IA Institute can be there to support them in their efforts.

To read more about the retreat, check out this article I wrote about the retreat at Boxes & Arrows.