Social IA Workshop

Rashmi Sinha, Thomas Vander Wal and I will be giving a Social Information Architecture Workshop at this year's IA Summit.

We'll be running our full-day session on March 22 (the Thursday before the Summit proper). The session will focus on using social technologies to enable people to construct and participate in information environments.

I'm pretty excited about this--we've got great presenters with deep experience in the field talking about a topic of growing importance. Rashmi has given some of the best presentations I've seen on the impact of social media on information architecture and the web. In addition, her company Uzanto developed Slideshare a popular site for sharing Powerpoint decks. Thomas coined folksonomy (of course) and speaks regularly about tagging and the social impact of technologies (e.g. see Thomas's presentation on the personal info cloud).

If you're looking for two days of practical web 2.0 training you could pair our session with Designing with Structured Data--featuring Mags Hanley and Thomas Vander Wal--on March 23. (Another good pre-conference will be Accelerator Workshops: Using Rapid Facilitation To Get Things Done In Days Instead of Weeks run by my colleagues Jess and Yvonne.)

Register before February 9 and you pay just $550 for the full-day workshop.

Here's the full session description:

Social Information Architecture Workshop

The rise of social media and sharing sites-like YouTube, Digg and Flickr-has meant new challenges for information architects. Such sites demonstrate how the information discovery experience is enriched by the addition of a social dimension. IAs working on findability for all sorts of sites must consider adding a social dimension to the information sharing and discovery experience. In addition to their usual bag of tricks, they can

• incorporate new classification techniques like tagging,
• anticipate social uses of information and design for sharability,
• create architectures for user-created content, and
• design feedback loops that change their architecture in response to user input.

This workshop will collect the latest research, techniques and case studies into a one-day session for intermediate and advanced practitioners. By the end of the session participants will learn

• social software fundamentals,
• the secrets of successful tagging applications,
• how to design for sharing,
• how to incorporate real-time feedback into their architectures,
• navigation design for social media,
• social IA for intranets, portals and collaborative sites.