Some very nice and well-meaning people have asked me to speak as the closing plenary at the IASummit conference this year, in Miami.

This is, as anyone who has been asked to do such a thing will tell you, a mixed blessing.

But I’m slogging through my insanely huge bucket of random thoughts from the last twelve months to surface the stuff that will, I dearly hope, be of interest and value to the crowd. Or, at the very least, keep their hungover cranial contents entertained long enough to stick around for Five-Minute Madness.

“Linkosophy” is a homely title. But it’s a hell of a lot catchier than “Information Architecture’s Role in the UX Context: What Got It Here, What It’s About, and Where It Might Be Headed.” Or some such claptrap.

Here’s the description and a link:

Closing Plenary: Linkosophy
Monday April 14 2008, 3:00 – 4:00PM

At times, especially in comparison to the industrial and academic disciplines of previous generations, the User Experience family of practices can feel terribly disorganized: so little clarity on roles and responsibilities, so much dithering over semantics and orthodoxy. And in the midst of all this, IA has struggled to explain itself as a practice and a domain of expertise.

But guess what? It turns out all of this is perfectly natural.

To explain why, we’ll use IA as an example to learn about how communities of practice work and why they come to be. Then we’ll dig deeper into describing the “domain” of Information Architecture, and explore the exciting implications for the future of this practice and its role within the bigger picture of User Experience Design.

In addition, I’ve been dragooned (but in a nice way … I just like saying “dragooned”) to participate in a panel about “Presence, identity, and attention in social web architecture” along with Christian Crumlish, Christina Wodtke, and Gene Smith, three people who know a heck of a lot more about this than I do. Normally when people ask me to talk about this topic, I crib stuff from slides those three have already written! Now I have to come up with my own junk. (Leisa Reichelt is another excellent thinker on this “presence” stuff, btw. And since she’s not going to be there, maybe I’ll just crib *her* stuff? heh… just kidding, Leisa. Really.)

Seriously, it should be a fascinating panel — we’ve been discussing it on a mailing list Christian set up, so there should be some sense that we actually prepared for it.