Behind the curtain

Peter is male, 36, and lives in a warehouse in Amsterdam that was built in 1720 (but remodeled more recently). At his university he combined computer science with ergonomics and came up with information ergonomics, which he applied to workflow software. He has been working in the user experience (UX) field since 1995 (1995-2000: General Design, 2000-2002: Satama Interactive, 2002-2005: EzGov, 2005-2006: User Intelligence, 2006-: Info.nl) and has been an active contributor to CHI and IA conferences and mailinglists. Peter is currently the senior Experience Designer at long-standing web agency Info.nl. He served on the Board of Advisors of the IA Institute and organizes the Amsterdam IA Cocktail Hours since 2001. Peter maintains a blog called  "[BEEP]".

Filip Borloo has been active in the internet industry since the mid nineties.
During the dot com boom he was working for one of the earliest entrants in the content management market, Mediasurface.  Filip was one of the first non-technical employees and was involved in all aspects of  growing the business. As International Business Development Manager he was responsible for setting up offices in San Francisco, New York, Munich, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm and Amsterdam for Mediasurface.
In 2001 Filip  returned to Belgium and worked as an Information Architect and Strategy Consultant for large government projects.
Since 2004 he combines his work as a consultant with managing icogs an internet technology company (some would say Web 2.0) based in Brussels but with global ambitions

Reinoud Bosman has been working as an IA since 1999 going from e-education to e-government to e-commerce. Projects he worked on include the UK online Tax Return while working at EzGov and applications for the mobile internet at his current employer MediaCatalyst. He discovered he was doing Information Architecture while working in Sydney where he heard of the term first and now tries to negotiate puzzled faces of family, friends and recruiters by helping to organise a conference on the topic. He holds a degree in Biology which only adds to the confusion.

Jared Folkmann has been working as an information architect for 7 years, in Canada, the US and the UK. He has worked for a variety of agencies and after 2 years as a Senior information architect at Wheel he has now joined GoodTechnology the Head of User Experience. He has worked for a variety of clients in almost every sector. Most recently he has completed projects for Absolut, Allied Domeqc, BA, and Marks and Spencer.

Margaret Hanley has worked as an Information Architect for more than 10 years on three continents. Margaret is currently the Executive Producer of Core Products for bbc.co.uk, managing a set of IA related products like search, homepage and Programme Information Pages. While working as an IA at the BBC, she developed content models and controlled vocabularies to describe everything from "Composer of the Week" to traffic updates on the Nottingham WIL site. Prior to joining the BBC, she served as Senior Information Architect at Ingenta in Oxford. In the United States, Margaret was a project manager for Argus Associates, concentrating on the development of deep information architecture for corporate web sites. Clients included Microsoft, IBM, Square D and LookSmart.

Richard Hill has been working with ASIS&T since 1989, having previously run a private recruiting firm for three years and managed a trade association for three years. He has been membership development director, director of communications, and director of government affairs. Dick has a masters degree in Comparative Literature from Occidental College and taught high school for 6 years.

Theba has been a practising Information Architect for six years. She is currently the IA at a European Investment Bank working on the next generation of Global Market Portals for Fixed Income.  Prior to this she worked at LexisNexis in the Taxonomies, Design & Development Team, specialising in Information Architecture and User Interface design. Her particular area of interest is in drawing on user research to inform taxonomy design and creating user-focused product features that leverage taxonomic capabilities.

James Kalbach holds a degree in library and information science from Rutgers University, as well as a master’s in music theory and composition. He is currently a Human Factors Engineer with LexisNexis and previously served as head of information architecture with Razorfish Germany. James is an active speaker and author on information architecture and usability in Germany, where he has cofounded an IA community.

Eric Reiss has been actively involved in the creation of menu-based programs, hypertext games, multimedia, and web projects for over 25 years. Following a long career as a copywriter for one of Europe’s leading business-to-business advertising agencies, he founded E-Reiss & Associates in January, 2001. In mid-2006, he co-founded FatDUX, a user-experience design company in Copenhagen. More info at www.fatdux.com.

Eric has lectured on a range of multimedia issues for colleagues, clients, and teaching institutions, including the Copenhagen Business School and the National School of Journalism. He has also addressed numerous professional organizations and is a top-rated keynote speaker. In November, 2000, his book, Practical Information Architecture was published by Addison-Wesley. In 2002, it also became available in Japanese and Korean. He is co-instigator of the IA Slam and author of Web Dogma ’06.

Eric currently serves on the Board of the Information Architecture Institute. He is also Chairman for the EuroIA Summit committee and is on the steering committee for the 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas.

Luca is a free lance Information Architect and assistant professor in Informatics for Humanistic Science (i.e. Information Architecture and Human Computer Interaction) at University for Foreigners of Perugia (Università per Stranieri di Perugia), in Italy. In 2003 he founded Architecta, the first Italian mailing list in IA, and run Trovabile (http://trovabile.org) an IA magazine (Trovabile is a neologism and linguistic calque on the English Findable). Luca is co-author of the book "Organizing Knowledge. From Lybraries to Information Architecture for the Web" (Milan, 2006). His website is http://lucarosati.it.