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Next month, the 11th Information Architecture Summit takes place, this time in Phoenix, AZ.

I’ve not gone to all of the summits…but darn near all of them. I was there in Boston in 2000 at the Logan Airport Hilton, back when the American Society of Information Science (before the Technology addition) first came up with the idea that there was something out there called “information architecture” that folks were dealing with. From the publication of Richard Saul Wurman’s Information Architects and Lou Rosenfeld & Peter Morville’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, a buzzword grew in its approach to structure, classification, organization, and findability of (mostly) Web-based experiences.

I remember that first summit fondly, if for the reasons that I was excited about being an HCI consultant with IconMedialab in Hamburg. I remember the first Five Minute Madness, where Peter Merholz grappled with the core disagreements that had been bubbling under all weekend. I remember Dick Hill working like a maniac to make things happen. I remember the insights from people like Christina Wodtke and Noel Franus and Eric Reiss on the perqs and pitfalls of being independent–how prescient they were! And I remember seeing the Neville Brothers in Cambridge, capping my first (but certainly not last) trip to Boston.

So much has changed since then, not only in the IA Summit world but also in the greater IA and UX world. Yet this summit continues to bring relevance, education, and connection that’s so critical to our community.