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Thyler Thompson (@core77 on Twitter) has created a great design discussion about airline boarding passes. Considering how much I tend to fly (though I’ve reduced that amount due to airlines’ lack of attention to customer experience&151;I’d rather ride my motorcycle Red Molly instead), I think he’s spot on. Perhaps one might quibble about the font choice, but the desire to create readable documents that highlight the most important information is to be lauded.

[Much of what follows comes from comments I made on Lou's blog in response to his post about the IA Summit...thought they made sense here, too.]

The IA Summit is once again gone. There’s always a sense of letdown the week after. With nine Summits under my belt, I’ve committed a bunch, a bunch of time, money, brain cells, and liver panels to this wacky assemblage of information architects, user interface designers, librarians, user experience architects, interaction designers, project managers, and other rabble-rousers.

Energy always occurs at different levels…and this year was no exception. I’ll leave it to others to do a full roundup. Suffice it to say, where last year’s controversy (such as it was) was JJG’s challenge to the IA crowd, this year’s seems to come from one of the founders of the Summit. Here’re my comments on the future of the Summit.

1. Format & Place: I don’t think we want to go to a single track for a multi-day event, because we’d either have to raise the prices exorbitantly or hold huge, impersonal sessions. On the other hand, I do remember the first summits’ model of aiport hotels where folks could come in on Friday, summit all day Saturday & half of Sunday, and then leave. By Summit 3 in Baltimore, there were the beginnings of movement to go to “more fun locations where people would enjoy the venue.” Maybe we need to return to the airports and their focus on just the Summit?

2. Speakers Paying for the Summit As you, Livia, and others have heard me say, I feel it’s unconscionable to make speakers pay for registration. Folks who speak are, more often than not, professionals who take a lot of their own time to create their presentations, travel at their own expense, and stand on the podium, imparting whatever wisdom they might have.

3. Rockstar Speakers A corollary to this point is the question of invited speakers. I found it a bit insulting that some speakers’ talk proposals were rejected (yes, I’m one of those) to make room for invited speakers, several of whom had no proposal on what they’re speak about. I’d recommend that invited people must meet the same deadlines of submissions as open submissions. Anyone who doesn’t meet the deadlines gets uninvited. On the spot. Rockstars draw, but perhaps we should hold them to a certain rigor, if for no other reason than to provide leadership for less-experienced members of our community.

4. Time Is On My Side: It’s also been said before, but people need 30 minutes between sessions *of networking time*, over and above any travel time to sessions. We’ve said many times that a key reason people come to these events is to meet and chat and learn from people in smaller engagements.

5. I Can’t HEAR You! As a detail, I’d like to see the luncheon topic tables somehow occur in a separate room, so that the white noise doesn’t drown out conversation…or have smaller-diameter tables. Again, this is a logistics detail.

Like Richard Dalton, I’ve been to 9 Summits (I missed Portland & Austin). I plan to come next year, as they say, Lord willin’ & the creek don’t rise. But I think this discussion is quite helpful to enable ASIS&T and its supporters to reflect on measures of success and improvement