I could do with your opinion…

I’ve been a full Member of the British Computing Society (BCS) since 2007, and I have mentioned in the past to various people that I don’t feel like I don’t get much benefit from it. It is probably one of those things that if you put effort into it then you’ll get benefit back, however nothing incredibly suited to me happens in the Bristol or South West regions of the BCS. One benefit that I may eventually take up is becoming “Chartered” as either an Engineer (CEng) or as an IT Practitioner (CITP), which can be done through the BCS.

The fact that the BCS seems to be targeting the IT Business niche, and trying to keep fingers in a few other pies means that my interest in the society is lacking. Therefore I am seriously considering resigning from the BCS in July, particularly as the cost of maintaining membership is also quite high when I’m trying to save some money so that I can put it into other interests (for personal, business and family interests).

So if I decided to leave the BCS, then I will still be a member of the three year Journeyman Scheme with the Information Technologists’ Company (a Livery Company of the City of London), also known as WCIT. Although the WCIT is quite similar in niche to the BCS, it provides a framework of support and development for its members and is also backed up with lots of lovely history and tradition from the ancient Guilds and Liveries of London. So I shall maintain my affiliation with the WCIT, even though it does cost quite a bit.

If I did resign from the BCS, however, I would feel like I had lost my professional body (and I would not have the postnominals “MBCS” anymore). But there are some alternatives, which might be more suited to my interests, skills, style and political-views and are potentially a lot cheaper than maintaining a membership at the BCS:

• The ACCU - originally a society for C and C++ developers, but has expended its interests into other areas of programming and software development.
• The IEEE Computer Society - an international society with a lot more of a practical feel to it than the BCS, primarily because it is a subsidiary of the Electrical and Electronic Engineering society. It has a huge amount of free stuff for its members, and is good value for the price.
• The ACM - an international society, but mainly based in the USA. It has more of an academic feel to it than the BCS. It has some nice benefits for its members, it isn’t incredibly cheap, but I think it might be cheaper than the BCS. I used to be a student member of the ACM, but decided that the BCS might be better for localised stuff when it came to full membership.
• The IAP - an interesting British society, about the same price as the BCS. It has a very practical feel to it, and some nice simple benefits for its members (particularly those who are consultants).
• The Association for Logic, Language and Information - a rather interesting European society for the bridges between Logic, Language and Information. Sounds quite me. It is a free to join, but it costs to receive their journal.

So, to the reader - what should I do?

1. Stay with the BCS and the WCIT, don’t join anything else
2. Stay with the BCS, the WCIT and join one of the above (which?)
3. Stay with the BCS, the WCIT and join something else (which?)
4. Leave the BCS, stay with the WCIT, but don’t join any professional body
5. Leave the BCS, stay with the WCIT and join one of the above (which one?)
6. Leave the BCS, stay with the WCIT and join something else (what?)
7. Leave the BCS, stay with the WCIT, but come back to the BCS in a couple of years, particularly for the CEng/CITP status

What do you think? Do you have any experience of any of the above societies, or have something else to share? Has membership of a professional body helped you to attain/maintain work? Has it benefited you in other ways? Please do share - either publicly using the comments system or privately by email ( daniel [at] vanirsystems [dot] com ).

Thank you,

Daniel

Tim Berners-Lee conceptualised the web when he was at CERN. He built a directory of the people, groups and projects - this was the ENQUIRE project. This eventually morphed into the World Wide Web, or a “Web of Documents”. Documents are indeed “objects”, but often not structurally defined. A great book about this is “Weaving the Web” by Berners-Lee.

The boom in this way of thinking came when businesses started to use XML to define “objects” within their processes. Being able to define something and pass it between one system and another was incredibly useful. For instance, I was in a development team quite a while back where we were communicating with BT using XML to describe land-line telephone accounts.

At the same time, people starting developing and using a new flavour of the “web” which was a lot more sociable. We saw the rise of “profiles“, “instant messaging“, “blogging” and “microblogging/broadcasting”. All of which are very easily to understand in terms of “objects”: Person X is described as (alpha, beta, omega) and owns a Blog B which is made up of Posts [p] and a Twitter account T which is made up of Updates [u].

The first reaction to the use of objects for web communications, was to provide developers with object descriptions using XML via “Application Programming Interfaces” (API) using the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). This was the birth of “Web Services“. Using web services a business could “talk” over the web, and social networks could “grab” data.

Unfortunately this wasn’t enough, as XML does not provide a standardised way of describing things, and also does not provide a standardised way of describing things in a distributed fashion. Distributed description is incredibly useful, it allows things to stay up to date - and not only that - it is philosophically/ethically more sound as people/groups/businesses “keep” their own data objects. The Semantic Web provided the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to deal with this, and the Linked Data initiative extends this effort to its true potential by providing analogues in well-used situations, processes and tools. (For instance, see my previous blog post on how Linked Data is both format and model agnostic).

This is all good. However, we live in an age where Collaboration is essential. With Collaboration comes the ability to edit, and with the ability to edit comes the need to have systems in place that can handle the areas of “identification“, “authentication“, “authorisation” and “trust“. We are starting to see this in systems such as OpenID, OAuth and WebID - particularly when coupled with FOAF [1].

These systems will be essential for getting distributed collaboration (via Linked Data) right, and distributed collaboration should be dealt with by the major Semantic Web / Linked Data software providers - and should be what web developers are thinking about next. Distributed Collaboration is going to be incredibly useful for both business-based and social-based web applications.

Please do feel free to comment if you have any relevant comments, or if you have any links to share relevant to the topic.

Many thanks,

Daniel

Footnotes

1. There is some nice information about WebID at the W3C site. Also see FOAF+SSL on the Openlink website, and the WebID protocol page on the OpenLink website.