In the world of Good Things, another one has just appeared. The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture has now opened its doors for business. It’s a non-profit organization dedicated to spreading the word about Information Architecture, and acting as a central community gathering point for IAs all over the world to join, teach, learn, play, kibitz, study, and help make the Web a better place. And since it was created by such dignitaries as Christina Wodtke, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, and is thus a melding of Argus and Boxes and Arrows, it is already the 800-pound Gorilla of the IA field. Some of the promising sections already up include their 25 Theses and a list of “Elevator Pitches” for promoting IA in the hallway.

The field of Information Architecture has certainly been ballooning over the last few years, and I’ve been watching it as an interested outsider. There is so much information that is being poured onto the Internet, and without some way to organize it all it’s going to quickly become a huge mess. Not that it isn’t already a mess, but the need to organize data grows exponentially as you add more and more. The people of SIG-IA, Argus, Adaptive Path, and now AIFIA, are the pioneers that have been birthing new ideas and processes in organizing and making sense of information. They are shaping the techniques that we will all use one day, and I, for one, am keeping my eyes open and trying to soak up as much of the good stuff as I can.