Bio

If you’ve read The Economist, donated to Wikipedia, or contributed to The World Monuments Fund, you’ve interacted with systems that Diana helped to architect.

She has 15+ years experience delivering initiatives, independently or as part of a professional services group, to clients including Stanford, The Gates Foundation and Teach For All. She is co-founder of Mentrix Group, a consultancy providing enterprise systems architecture, technology strategy, and content systems development. She also takes meeting notes with a fountain pen and is an aspiring plant chef.

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Systems are communication structures (Talk, Main Conference)
by Diana Montalion

Our systems mirror our thinking and collective communication. When architecting, we are synthesizing people's knowledge, experience and good judgement. We are unionizing people's creation process to build them. Achieving conceptual integrity in a system requires crafting conceptual integrity in people.

The art and science of collective reasoning predates technology by seven centuries. Our software and systems design work is strengthened by practicing strong sociotechnical methods for making logical and consistent decisions *based on valid reasons*. This talk will highlight those practices and discuss some modern-challenges to thinking well together.