After attending the techMaine conference this week, it got me thinking about professional organizations. My company is a member of techMaine and I am on the board (and a paid member) of the Association of REALbasic Developers.
My techMaine membership allows me to support the local technical community. I also get business leads (techConnect), but few of those are for work that we do. I also get a discount to the conference and a listing in the member directory on the web site. Overall, it’s worth the $150 a year to me.
With my membership in ARBP, I get a subscription to REALbasic Developer Magazine and over $700 in discounts on REALbasic software. ARBP is easily worth $150 to me.
Years ago I was a member of the Worldwide Institute of Software Architects. Although the web site is still up, it doesn’t look like it’s been updated in years, so I don’t know if WWISA is still an active organization. I didn’t get much out of that organization anyway, other than a few cool stickers (which I still have).
I’m evaluating ACM and IEEE. Both of those are $100 year and each include access to Safari books online, which looks interesting. I already get a free digital subscription to ACM Queue magazine, but I can’t say I read it all that often. I’ve read their Communications magazine in the past but it was all too academic for my tastes.
Anyone out there a member of these two organizations? Have you gotten value out of them? Which do you prefer?
4 Responses to “Professional Organizations”
I highly recommend the Association of Shareware Professionals. (http://www.asp-shareware.org/). The name is a little antiquated, but the member newsgroups are an excellent resource.
Thanks, Bob. I had forgotten about ASP. I’ll check it out.
IEEE Safari Book acccess is limited to 600 titles. That’s pushing 10% of their 6565 titles, and a preselected list arranged by IEEE and Safari.
Paul, I was a member of IEEE Computer Society for maybe two years. I never got enough out of it to justify the ~$150 I was spending (I got the IEEE Software magazine subscription too). I tried going to the local Computer Society meetings, but it was a joint meeting with all of the other IEEE societies in the area, and everyone else there was a “real” engineer, the kind that work with wind tunnels. So that wasn’t too useful for me.
IEEE Software was too academic for me to get anything of practical use from it. I gave up entirely on software development magazines last year. I still read books, though.