IT organisations gear up for milestone year in 2007

Friday 01 December 2006 12:00

This year Computer Weekly and the National Computing Centre celebrated their 40th anniversaries, and the Parliamentary IT Committee marked its 25th year.

Next year another batch of IT organisations celebrate similar milestones, including the British Computer Society (50 years), the Real Time Club (40 years), the BCS Elite group (25 years ), the Information Technologists Company (15 years) and IT4Communities (five years).

The British Computer Society has planned a series of events and activities for its golden anniversary, ranging from a grand anniversary dinner in May to a children's code breaking competition.

One highlight will be a lecture in May by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web. As well as his role as director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Berners-Lee is a visiting professor at the University of Southampton, where Nigel Shadbolt, this year's BCS president, is professor of artificial intelligence.

Other BCS anniversary activities include an Oxfordshire schools web competition, a regional computer challenge organised by the BCS West Yorkshire Branch, an IT personality of the year competition and an essay prize organised by BCS Mauritius.

The 1,600-strong BCS Elite IT directors group has booked Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy for its 25th anniversary dinner in November. The event continues a line of presentations to Elite from high-profile IT industry leaders. Last year, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates addressed an Elite meeting, and Michael Dell is another previous speaker.

Celebrating its 40th year is the Real Time Club, which describes itself as "a dining club with attitude". The group, comprising an assortment of senior IT leaders, has a track record of helping to raise concerns and shape arguments to secure change. Its 40th anniversary debate will push for synchronous 40Mbytes broadband for the home to enable the UK to compete globally.

Another milestone for 2007 is the 15th anniversary of the Information Technologists Company being awarded its status as the City of London's 100th livery company. Until this year known as the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, the organisation has notched up many achievements in the area of IT-related charity and educational activities.

One major success in that time has been an ongoing programme to design a communication system to serve the needs of terminally ill children and install it in the UK's 35 children's hospices.

The Information Technologists Company also set up IT4Communities, an organisation that has provided the infrastructure to enable IT professionals to volunteer more than £2m worth of their time and skills to community projects and charities since 2002.

IT4Communities, which celebrates its fifth anniversary in 2007, has been supported from the outset by Computer Weekly. Today, it has some 3,500 IT professionals volunteering their services to more than 1,000 charities.

Key anniversary events 2007

British Computer Society