Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Javier Velasco

Javier Velasco — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:25 GMT

I’ll work on this with him…

Javier Velasco — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:26 GMT

The IA Institute has a great job board, you need to be a member to view the detailed offers though.

http://www.iainstitute.org/jobboard/

Javier Velasco — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:36 GMT

Donna’s right, this is not related to Web 2.0, It’s a strategy design problem.

We’re all big fans of listening to users, but you also have to balance their requests with what your organization needs. If placing the news headlines in the home suits your organization’s needs, you just have to do it in a way that works for the uses.

This is like raising kids, you can’t give them everything they ask for, or hide everything they haven’t asked for. The designer has to take the final decision based on the project’s context and his own experience.

Hope this helps, I don’t think this is related to article proposals.

Javier Velasco — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:38 GMT

There’s great interest in seeign this article, but who wants to write it???

Javier Velasco — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:48 GMT

Another path you can take is to join an online community of colleagues to help you out, send them particular questions. BTW once you’ve figured it out, it would make an excelent BoxesandArrows article!

Here are some forums you can join:
http://iainstitute.org/signup/
http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/
http://lists.evolt.org/ (thelist)

good luck!

Javier Velasco — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 03:00:10 GMT

Great story Christina, thanks for sharing your lessons.

The design looks great too :)

Javier Velasco — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 21:13:34 GMT

Hi Austin,

I had asked Christina and Anders for some coaching on how to organize this, one of the keys was to try to let the hotel manage as much production as possible. I had the hotel handle the meals, the bus and even the trip to the nearby winery, since they all belong to the same holding.

Most of the things that went wrong or almost wrong were related to the problems of the culture in my country, my largest lesson would be “check everything twice”. Image how you would feel if they tell you the bus that you had reserved months ago is not booked, just the day before departure. Other problems were also related to incompetency by the hotel administration, we had some minor inconveniences in distributing the people in the rooms, and checkout was a pain.

Another thing that I didn’t like all that much was the fact that the presentations were over-developed for the retreat format, it felt more like a regular conference in a retreat disguise, the ideas weren’t really raw. I’d also suggest not to place tables in the room and try to avoid people from opening up their laptops, physical space configuration will have a great impact on the conversation. Lastly, managing the schedule can be a huge challenge, we had to fudge it every hour since there were more people lining up to talk and we didn’t want to leave anyone out.

Javier Velasco — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 01:54:33 GMT

Great Job Shiv, I’ve been following this topic lately and this is a nice review, very clear, congrats.