I am honored to be nominated for President of the IA Institute. It is my wish and my promise that if you elect me I will do my best to promote what former IAI President Eric Reiss once described as the “concept, community, and craft of Information Architecture.” I have been a member of the IA Institute since the beginning and have found a group of information-obsessed people who get it and who want others to get it, too. For me, it’s become a calling. I am sure many of you know just what I mean and it will be my privilege to introduce a new generation of IAs to this world I have come to love so dearly.
Position Statement
I have a huge task that I would like to complete over the next two years, and it is not an easy one. But we are IAs and we like hard problems, right? Over the years, I have sat through many iterations of plans, studies and countless deliverables and we still have the same website and membership database we had in 2006 along with a deteriorating experience that mars the credibility of our organization. As President of the IA Institute, I pledge to *finally* update the IAInstitute.org website to a modern, functional resource for members and those interested in the field of IA. This is my number one goal. We will get this done.
I will continue the barn-raising work that Abby Covert, Rachael Hodder and their many volunteers are doing to restore and strengthen our library platform and the resources that define our institution. In fact, when the IA Institute first started, the keystone project was developing a library of resources for practitioners and educators. It is a resource that continues to be cited in books and coursework and has value.
I will further develop relationships with the stakeholder groups defined by the IAI Board in 2011 to align resources with needs. As a professional association this means completing the circle from students to practitioners to service providers to employers to the teachers and mentors of the next generation of IAs. I will work to develop relationships with each of these stakeholder groups to strengthen our offerings so that everyone does their job better. This means stronger ties to academic and training institutions, developing mentoring and internship programs, a focus on the local group via WorldIADay, renewed alliances with partner organizations such as conferences and thought leaders, leadership opportunities for members, and a better way to highlight and promote the work that our members are doing.
In addition, I pledge to uphold the accountability and transparency requirements of a non-profit institution. Members commit to the Institute and deserve to know what is going on. For too long communications with our community have been infrequent and incomplete. This won’t happen when I am President. You will hear from me and I will want to hear from you frequently. Please contact me at nwhysel@gmail.com if you have questions about my plans for IAI.
About Me
Noreen Whysel is the former Operations Manager of the Information Architecture Institute, serving from 2005-2014. She started as a volunteer in the education committee, led the mentoring program for many years, sat on the working group that launched the Journal of Information Architecture, continues to help support and troubleshoot the enterprise systems, and generally knows more about the Institute than most people alive today. In addition, she has participated in a number of leadership positions including:
- Leader of the WikiProject: Information Architecture on Wikipedia
- Vice Chair of the User Experience Committee for the ID Ecosystem Steering Group, a NIST initiative working to implement White House NSTIC guidelines
- Peer Reviewer, IA Summit 2016; presented talks and posters at IAS12, IAS13, and IAS15; led mentoring activities for IAS09 and IAS10
- Board of Directors of GISMO, a NYC-based geographic information systems association, serving as digital archivist for pending 9/11 project
- Co-Chair of the American Theatre Archive Project, New York Chapter
Noreen is currently the Community Manager for the OWASP Foundation, which funds open source web application security projects. She also volunteers as Social Media Manager for the research group, Architecture_MPS, which operates as a socially positive forum for the analysis of architecture, landscape and urbanism in the mediated, politicized environment of contemporary culture.
Noreen holds an MSLIS from Pratt Institute with concentrations in User Experience Design and Digital Humanities and a BA in Psychology from Columbia University. Her blog/portfolio/project repository is at whysel.com.
