Was talking with Peter, the organizer of the AIfIA Translations Project and it looks like they are into beta mode. It’s a great project which aims to identify key texts in the IA field and translate them to as many languages as possible.
So far, there’s some;
which I think is pretty impressive. You can even get a large portion of the actual website in your preferred language once you go to the translations page (selection on the left).
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:
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.
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!
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!
That’s annoying — last week I got a call from DOLA, asking if I would be able to come in early next week (this week) to talk to them about doing some IA work for them.
I had to turn them down, because I am now working at AdultShop.com, which is taking up nearly all of my time, and I simply wouldn’t have had time to dedicate to the job. I asked them what they were doing anyway, and apparently they wanted me to work on the information architecture of their entire suite of websites and online applications – bugger!
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.
You rock Internet.