After two years of solid support, SMS Management and Technology (ACT) has decided to discontinue sponsorship of the Canberra IA Cocktail Hours.
On behalf of the disorganisation team, I would like to thank SMS (in particular, Regional Director Melanie Kontze and National Web&IM Lead Stephen Hall) for their support over the last two years. Without them we would not have had a regular venue when restarting the meetings.
Looking now to the future - we have two corporate hosting sponsors (Eureka Strategic Research and Stamford Interactive) who provide us with a venue on a rotating basis, and Formulate Information Design who provide wine and nibbles when we are at Eureka. To share the load, I would like to invite another hosting corporate sponsor to the table.
Sponsorship is not onerous - it just means providing a venue once every 2-3 months for about a dozen people - add in a couple of bottles of wine and some chips/dip/cheese and you will have our eternal thanks. If you are in the web/design/market research industry, the business value proposition is that every attendee is a potential client, a potential employee or a current competitor - it is a good opportunity to mingle.
If you are interested in sponsoring the Canberra IA Cocktail Hour, please contact me on email facibus AT gmail DOT com.
The IA Cocktail Hours have been going swimmingly and it’s now time for us to prepare the schedule for the remainder of 2008.
Being a presenter at IA Cocktail Hour is easy. The audience is warm and engaged, there’s plenty of wine and nibbles to keep the crowd happy and you don’t even have to have slides, if you don’t want to. 
Each Cocktail Hour typically involves two speakers: one discussing a Method and another discussing a Case Study. There is approximately 1 hour for the two talks in total—after subtracting 30 minutes for socialising & networking time. This usually means 30 minutes per presentation, but the time can be divided amongst the two talks in whatever way the presenters see fit.
What sort of things can you talk about? Anything related to information architecture, user-centred design, usability and the like is welcome. The topic areas for the method talks so far have been pretty broad: from project management to prototyping; from forms design to design consulting. The case studies have been fascinating warts-and-all insights into how such things actually get carried out in the real world. As you can imagine, both the methodology and case study talks have given attendees plenty to think about and discuss. Thank you to all the presenters we have had to date.
For more information about the Hours, see IA Cocktail Hours.
If you are interested in presenting at the Hours, please drop an email to Julie Hale at jhale [at] smsmt [dot] com. The next IA Cocktail Hour is scheduled for Thursday 26 June and we don’t have any presenters yet, so don’t delay!
The next Canberra IA Cocktail Hour is Thursday 22 May 2008.
Caronne Carruthers-Taylor is going to be speaking on Protoyping with Axure 5. This new release of Axure brings version control, shared masters and some other features - and also some issues to consider for those thinking of making the upgrade.
The second speaking slot is free for a case study - if you have worked on or are working on an interesting project in the IA/UXD/UCD/IS/web community spaces and would like to present on it for 15 minutes please get in touch with Andrew Boyd at [facibus AT gmail DOT com].
Those who are interested are welcome to join us afterwards for an informal dinner in Manuka/Kingston.
Time: 17:30-19:00
Day/Date: Thursday 22 May 2008
Venue: Stamford Interactive
Level 1
301 Canberra Avenue (right near Officeworks)
Fyshwick
Please RSVP to [facibus AT gmail DOT com] as soon as possible for catering purposes.
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