ASIS&T Pacific Northwest Chapter

Our monthly meetup is this evening from 7-10pm at the Elysian Pub in Capitol Hill. We meet on the 2nd Tuesday of every month to socialize, talk shop, and, of course, drink beer.

For more information, visit our meetup.com site!

Yes, you read that right. We’re doing it again.

InfoCamp Seattle 2008 will be at the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center (same place as last year) in late September.

Stay tuned for more details!

Get together to have drinks, chat, network, and geek out with fellow information architects, librarians, usability experts, user experience designers, and other like-minded people! It’s open to anyone, so bring a friend — especially those in other local organizations. The format will be casual, but all are encouraged to bring something to discuss — recent work, an interesting topic, or even your resume.

Seattle
Tuesday, March 11, 7-10pm
Elysian Brewing Company
1221 E Pike St, Seattle, WA
http://ia.meetup.com/57

Portland
Monday, March 17, 6:30pm
Alexis Greek Restaurant
215 W. Burnside, Portland OR
http://ia.meetup.com/64

Willamette Valley
Coming soon!

See you there!

95 people attended InfoCamp Seattle 2007 this weekend for 2 full days of sessions. It went about as well as we could have hoped. We got tons of comments that the un-conference format was extremely rewarding.

The sessions were chock full of great discussion and resulted in some very useful best practices. We’ve heard from many InfoCamp participants that their sessions were useful and educational.

Overall, InfoCamp Seattle 2007 surpassed our expectations in nearly every regard. Thanks to all who led sessions, volunteered, sponsored, and participated this weekend! We hope we can do this again next year — what do you think?

I’m trying to attend (and pay attention to) sessions, help keep InfoCamp running smoothly, and take photos, so it looks like I won’t be able to liveblog the event…

Others are, though: scroll down to the bottom of the InfoCamp Seattle 2007 wiki to see who’s blogging! (And if you don’t like scrolling, change the wiki so it’s better organized!)

And please add yourself, if you’re writing about InfoCamp.

InfoCamp 2007 has begun!

Sign-ups for the first session:

More later…

Greetings InfoCamp Seattle 2007 participants!

We’re all looking forward to seeing you at InfoCamp this weekend! If you haven’t been to this sort of “un-conference” before, this message will help you get ready. (By the way: If you haven’t yet, it’s not too late to sign up for InfoCamp!)

Firstly, you won’t be just an “attendee” at this conference, you’ll be a “participant”. Everyone who comes to InfoCamp will participate in some way, whether by proposing and running a session or by contributing to a session they care about. We all benefit from each other’s input and ideas, which is why we’ve chosen this un-conference format. Your conference team of volunteers has created an open schedule that you and other participants will fill up with sessions.

Sessions this weekend will include discussions, talks, and demos. They may be more loosely organized than you usually expect at a conference, as they can take whatever form the people in the session agree on. Prepare to discuss, debate, teach, and learn.

On the first day, we’ll start at 9am with a round of coffee and introductions, and Blue Flavor co-founder Nick Finck will give our keynote. After that, it’s up to you: nearly two full days of participant-determined talks. Refer to The Schedule (in the lobby near the registration table) often throughout the conference to keep tabs on what’s available.

Throughout the conference, we’ll all come together occasionally to hear about what’s happened and what’s next.

On the second day, we’ll have a plenary session in which Bob Boiko will give a lively talk that you’ll want be sure to hear. At the end of the conference on Sunday at 5pm, we’ll reconvene for fun wrap-up session… with prizes!

How it works:
- Each session will be an hour long.
- There will be “pitch sessions” between sessions for people to hear about what’s next.
- You can sign up to lead a session in advance, and then pitch the idea during a pitch session.
- Sharing half-formed ideas, work in progress, and unsolved problems is encouraged.
- Lunch will be provided both days.
- We will give out information about how to access the wireless network.
- Meeting people and networking are part of the purpose of the event – make a new friend!
- There will be exhibit tables in the lobby with swag.
- Have fun!

See http://barcamp.org/WhatToExpect and http://barcamp.org/TheRulesOfBarCamp for more details.

For more details about our speakers, logistics, and sponsors, see http://asistpnw.org/infocamp2007/. To join a discussion list about this conference, go to http://groups.google.com/group/infocampsea.

Thanks are due in particular to all our sponsors for making this possible and to our volunteers for making it real.

Thanks,

Aaron, Andy, Corprew, Kristen, and Rachel
Your InfoCamp Seattle 2007 Organizers.

PS: If this all sounds fun, sign up for InfoCamp!

InfoCamp Seattle 2007 is now on the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer web sites!

John Cook of the P-I mentions InfoCamp in his Venture Blog, and the Times mentions it on their Business Events Calendar.

Less than a week until InfoCamp! Around 80 folks are registered as of now; the numbers are sure to go up, especially with a group from UBC coming down. Join us at Youngstown this Saturday!

InfoCamp Seattle 2007 is getting some great publicity in blogs and websites!

One of the first places InfoCamp was posted, besides the BarCamp Community Wiki and the IA Meetup Group, was on Yahoo! Upcoming Events (thanks, Zach!), where it’s been cross-listed in groups such as Web Conference Junkies and experience design. Eventful and Zvents are also listing InfoCamp.

After news of InfoCamp was sent to various listservs, a couple of library-related blogs picked up on it: the Beyond the Job Blog, Peter Scott’s Library Blog, and Dragonfly - News from the Pacific Northwest Regional Medical Library. Librarians are also seeing the news on a WebJunction discussion board, the Oregon Library Association Hotline Blog, and a library-related web site called Northwest Central. We hope to attract folks who work in libraries, so it’s great to see this coverage!

Students are talking about InfoCamp too… on Facebook and the Silverfish events calendar, and even in Canada!

Several local websites have mentioned InfoCamp, including The Seattle Networking Guide, West Seattle Blog, Meet at the Pig, Blue Flavor Blog, and Seattle24×7.

Business and technology websites, such as TechVenue and Washington CEO, are also featuring InfoCamp!

Last, but not least, some of our sponsors are promoting InfoCamp: ASIS&T, The Information Architecture Institute, the UW Information School, and Digital Web Magazine, as is our venue, Youngstown Cultural Arts Center. Thank you!

It’s exciting to see so many different communities taking an interest in InfoCamp! If you see other places it’s been listed, we’d love to hear about them. Comment here or email us…

Hope to see you there!

Join us at InfoCamp Seattle 2007, where two leaders in the LIS and technology fields — Bob Boiko and Nick Finck — will share their wisdom in the keynote and plenary sessions!

Bob Boiko is founder and president of Metatorial Services Inc., and is a faculty member of the University of Washington Information School. Recognized world-wide as a leader in the field of content management, he has almost 20 years of experience designing and building Web, hypertext and multimedia systems and tools for some of the world’s top technology corporations (including Microsoft, Motorola, and Boeing).

Nick Finck founded his first Web consultancy in 1994 in Portland, Oregon and has since created Web experiences for various Fortune 50 and 500 companies including Boeing, IBM and Microsoft. He is currently the co-founder of Blue Flavor, a Seattle based web strategy company that focuses on people-centric solutions.

InfoCamp will be on October 13 and 14, 2007, in Seattle. Registration is still open - only $20 (and FREE for students, event volunteers, or members of ASIS&T or IAI). All are invited!