The IA Summit is a place to meet peers, learn from others and get inspired through great workshops, presentations and poster sessions. Many of the sessions deal with ideas, concepts and theories of the IA field in which presenters regularly refer to actual projects and their deliverables to illustrate their points. We often see an interesting wireframe, a creative new way of showing a sitemap, or a funky diagram that really makes or breaks a project, but there is hardly ever time to actually go into much detail on those deliverables.

This year we are organizing a second annual Wall of Deliverables – a whole area in the conference location dedicated to all kinds of different deliverables for people to browse through, discuss and be inspired by. And we want your participation.  You must at one point in a recent project have thought: ‘Hey, this is a great way of showing this interaction to the client’, or ‘Internal communication has really improved since we introduced this deliverable into the process’, or ‘this was a spectacular failure, I sure learned from it!’. Those are the deliverables we are looking for – anything ranging from personas to wireframes to conceptual models to user research reports – the whole spectrum of outputs from your IA sweat and tears.

When

The Wall of Deliverables will be on display for most of the conference, up by the opening keynote and available through Sunday’s lunch when winners are announced and prizes awarded.

Voting for the top deliverables will take place through the Saturday’s sessions. However, we’ll have a dedicated time during the program on Saturday for those who submitted to present their items informally (much like the poster session) and answer questions. Attendees will also be encouraged to vote during this period.

What’s in it for me?

Inspiration & Knowledge Sharing

First and foremost, by contributing your own deliverables, you will be inspiring your fellow IAs and their approaches to deliverable creation. That in itself should be enough to win you over. By experiencing how others addressed their documentation needs, you may uncover new ways to tackle your own challenges.

This exchange will allow others to ask you questions about your work, and you will probably find yourself explaining a cool trick or sharing frustration over that missing tool in OmniGraffle, Visio, InDesign, Illustrator, Axure, you name it. Let’s geek out together!

Cool Prizes? How about a Nintendo Wii?

To make things a bit more interesting, we will award prizes for the best deliverables. A panel of judges will look at criteria such as style, structure, organization, clarity, level of inspiration, ‘transcendence’ and uniqueness. But more importantly, all attendees have a say in this too. As you check out the contributed deliverables, you can vote for YOUR favorite deliverables. A grand prize Nintendo Wii will be awarded to both the judge’s top deliverable as well as the top vote-getter. Second and third place in attendee voting be awarded an Apple iPod Shuffle.

A special thanks goes to EightShapes and User Intelligence for sponsoring the awards. And your chances just got better since deliverable geeks from both organizations are ineligible for the prizes! (Note that staff members of companies sponsoring prizes are eligible for prizes based on attendee voting)

How do I contribute?

To give your deliverable a little bit of context, we are asking all contributors to register their deliverable via an online form that collects critical information including . We’ll print all registrations prior to the conference, and position your deliverable with context on the wall itself for your.

You can submit before the conference by completing our entry form and then sending your deliverable (in PDF format) to summitdeliverables@gmail.com. Less preferred, but still certainly acceptable, is to bring your deliverables to the conference and hand them to anyone manning the Wall of Deliverables on Friday or early Saturday.

Otherwise, you can fill out details by hand during the conference. If you want to submit anonymously, let us know (as long as it’s your work).

Also, come by the wall to get a badge sticker indicating that your deliverable is on display. This will make it easier for people to find you if they have questions or comments about your submission.

Constraints

There are a few limitations with regards to the size of your deliverables. We cannot accept documents that are bigger than Tabloid/A3 sheets (be creative, maybe a few pictures of your humongous deliverable are enough to tell the story!). If you are bringing your own deliverable, there is no strict limit on the number of pages. However, if you want us to print your deliverable, make sure it does not contain more than 20 pages (and preferably is limited to 2-4 pages). We cannot guarantee that we can print the deliverables in color, so it is best you bring your own if you have specific requirements.

Submit Your Deliverable!

Don’t hold back! Just find your favorite deliverable, print it and bring it along. If you want us to print it, make sure to register for the wall and send the deliverable to summitdeliverables@gmail.com by March 10th, at the latest. Regardless, we would love to know if you’re planning on participating (send us a note!) so we can ensure there is enough room for all contributions.

Volunteers

If you want to contribute some of your time during the IA Summit, we would appreciate that very much! We would like to have the Wall manned as much as possible , so we can explain what the Wall us, how you can/could have participated etc. Just send an email to volunteer@wallofdeliverables.com  with your contact details, and your availability over the IA Summit schedule. We will contact you as soon as possible.

After the IA Summit

We feel that sharing knowledge and providing inspiration is not necessarily something that should only happen during a conference. We are therefore planning on keeping the Wall of Deliverables online after the IA Summit 2009. The online Wall will accept new entries that can serve as inspiration to you and all your peers.

We are looking into possibilities of providing some sort of incentive for people to send in their deliverables after the IA Summit. This could be in the shape of a ‘Best of the Month’ badge up to actual prizes. We are not sure yet. If you support this idea, and would like to sponsor prizes, please contact us!