2025-05-07
As something of a relic from my ever receding past as an "IT professional", I still get communications from my erstwhile professional body, since I haven't found a good reason for cutting off my membership subscription.
It's communications can be educational, given that it has "transformed" itself in some ways since I was permitted membership, and not all to the good in my jaundiced curmudgeonly view.
Sometimes transformation can be for the good, and sometimes for the modish but ephemeral fashion of the day (Good Lord, give me the wisdom to differentiate them!). In my old-fashioned viewpoint (which I still see few reasonable grounds to modify), a leading professional body should primarily devote itself to the well-being of the profession, the advancement of its technical and scientific knowledge base, and the education of its practitioners, of the public in general (and of the government in particular) with regard to the contribution that the profession can (and should or should not) make to the greater good of society.
So bluntly, matters "woke" should in principle never be allowed to colour matters educational scientific technical or professional, and I find myself in mild disagreement with colloquia that impose non-professional aspects that effect a limit on attendance or contribution, because these interfere with free speech.
My disagreement is definite and principled, but mild, and therefore not necessarily absolute, for to be human is to err and we must extend that possibility to everybody as we would have it extended to ourselves. Everyone in this uncertain world is entitled both to make mistakes and to learn from them.
Institutions such as the BCS and the Civil Service should have formal processes to dispassionately capture that learning.
Of course, some mistakes can be catastrophic, and defence against self-inflicted catastrophe are a requirement, particularly for the government. The BCS as a professional body must be cognisant of this and promote the "if it can go wrong it will" section for every proposal or position paper - the Government's Net Zero project clearly never had such an analysis (although as far as I know this was not down to the BCS!).
So with all that said, I feature today a report from the (previously august, but now distinctly modish) BCS, because the Keynote Speaker makes a good point that we should all appreciate and benefit from, whatever our class, social standing, profession, or woke categorisation.
