Programming and IA or "How to Stop Worrying and Love Your Techies" Sunday, 9:30 - 10:00 Session Two Simon Wistow Programming and IA or "How to Stop Worrying and Love Your Techies" Simon Wistow is a programmer for Yahoo! Programmers and Information Architects have much in common, yet cross discipline interaction seems to, mostly, be limited to project meetings and the occasional snide comment on mailing lists. Whilst this is understandable - both disciplines are an uneasy mix of science and art - it remains a shame since, in the family tree of information smiths, IAs and coders are the closest thing there is to kissing cousins. Both deal in the generation, organization and manipulation of data and, as such, have much to learn from each - many problems that IAs face are directly orthogonal to problems already 'solved' in Computer Science and lessons learnt, for example, in file system implementation, OO and Database design can be mapped to IA concepts such as content models and faceted classification. Of course, the reverse is also true. This presentation will attempt to: * Give Information Architects a glimpse into the working methodologies of programmers and how we view you. * Hopefully dispel some myths about techies. * Talk about CS concepts in relation to Information Architectures .. and finally * Suggest how IAs and programmers can work together more effectively without resorting to flamewars and rhetoric. As an encore it may try and bring about world peace. View the Conference Schedule

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