Fran Alexander: Democratizing Taxonomy Practice

Storytelling is the oldest content practice. Alan Porter helps enterprises and content practitioners improve their story craft.  Alan shows how better stories both convey the unique benefits of a business to their customers and improve cross-functional communication within organizations. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/alan-porter/

As recently as 40 years ago, we didn't have much need for the word "content." But as soon as we started delivering the same information via multiple channels, we needed a way to identify the essential elements of content assemblies and to work with them independent of their various manifestations in information products. So the concept of "content" was born. Joe Gollner has worked with content from its earliest days and has crafted a multi-layered definition to account for its many aspects. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/joe-gollner/

Localizing digital product content is challenging on its own. When you add the need to communicate about sensitive financial topics to very specific audiences, the complexity of the work quickly grows. Stephanie Pereira is a content design manager working on the Google Payments product. She deftly balances a range of internal compliance and design concerns with the very specific hyper-localization needs of her audience.  (We had an internet connection issue around 28:00 - apologies for the break in continuity.) https://ellessmedia.com/csi/stephanie-pereira/

Now in its third edition, Colleen Jones's book "The Content Advantage" has become a classic in the content-profession literature. The new edition of the book continues to highlight content intelligence and content effectiveness and adds a new focus on the impact and use of AI in content programs. It also takes a fresh look at the enduring concepts of digital disruption and digital transformation, both of which have been accelerated by the arrival of new AI technology. https://contentandai.com/colleen-jones/

Over the past ten years, Chris Bach has been at the forefront of the transformation of web development.  Chris coined the term "Jamstack," which refers to one of the first conceptions of a composable web architecture (the acronym JAM accounts for the JavaScript, APIs, and markdown that make up a simple decoupled web system). He also founded Netlify, a company that supports these new architectures and which now serves tens of millions of customers. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/chris-bach/

There is always more taxonomy work to be done than there are practitioners to do it. Fran Alexander's solution to this imbalance is to democratize taxonomy practice. Fran's work actually spans the full range of semantic practices, from simple term lists to taxonomies, thesauruses, and ontologies and knowledge graphs. Wherever she's working in this span of activities, she's always happy to bring other practitioners along with her. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/fran-alexander/

Where web accessibility, digital sustainability, content management, open-source software, and web standards intersect, you'll find Mike Gifford. Mike is the open standards and practices lead at Civic Actions, a company that helps governments deliver better digital services.  Through his practice, Mike ensures that the content systems they deliver are built as sustainably as possible, deliver accessible experiences to citizens, and work well for authors and others who use the system. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/mike-gifford/

Through her taxonomy and other information architecture work, Michele Ann Jenkins helps people across the organizations she works with align their mental models and terminology usage. This alignment of concerns and language forms the foundation of the semantic architecture that is so crucial to modern content systems.  https://ellessmedia.com/csi/michele-ann-jenkins/

Modern content projects get the best results when content strategy and conceptual meaning are considered together, and the results can really shine when long-time collaborators do the work. Ilse Jonker and Joyce van Aalten are independent consultants who have teamed up on many content projects over the past dozen years. Ilse focuses on content strategy and structure, and Joyce focuses on taxonomy and semantics. Together they build the scaffolding the supports their clients' content operations. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/ilse-and-joyce/

Vinish Garg takes a holistic and pragmatic view of the role of content and other crafts in digital product design, using an approach he calls "product sense."   Content strategy and design are just two of many practices that contribute to the success of any digital product. All digital practitioners justifiably take pride in their individual crafts, but Vinish encourages content, design, and other practitioners to favor product utility over their individual crafts. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/vinish-garg/