Are you a member of any professional associations?
8 points by regulator
8 points by regulator
I am wondering if any lobsters are members of professional organizations / associations such as IEEE, ACM, SIAM, or others.
If you are a member, can you speak to the benefits of participating in these organizations and your experiences with them?
I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.
technically yes; IEEE. But mostly it's so i can get a discount rate on conferences.
I am an affirmed member of the order of the engineer. That one matters to me, but probably isn't quite what you mean.
I am a member of the ACM, but mostly for the much cheaper O'Reilly subscription.
I've been pondering more and more the need to build networks lately, and one of the options I've considered is contacting my local chapters of the ACM too. But I suspect they will be quite dead.
I had a similar impulse and went to see if there was a functioning local LOPSA chapter, only to learn that LOPSA is now defunct. I began wondering if it was even worth it, which led to this post.
Although not strictly professional associations, I always promote Zig Day or my own Handmade Cities. They are local meetups "across the globe" which announce gatherings every so often.
The problem is they're more specialized interests than ACM.
Also in my case I'm not on social media due to my ick with slop. Lobsters is an exception, and HN to a much lesser degree. There are other interesting organizations feeling this way.. which makes it harder for engineers like yourself to discover what's out there.
The main advantages of union member memberships like PROSA in Denmark are:
More advantages are listed in the link I provided. I don't want to just copy paste the whole thing.
I've been to some of the Functional Programming meetups hosted in their offices, and I thought it was very generous of them, especially since it is a great location close to Vesterport and the Lake Pavilion.
No, I used to be a member of IEEE and ACM. Personally, I didn't get any value other than periodic news letters from them.
I was a member of several in a previous life when I was doing geology instead of tech. It wasn't worth it then, so I haven't looked into it.
I do kinda like the ACM, from a distance.
I used to be a student member of the ACM, but I don't feel I am the intended audience for their organization. I don't feel the member benefits really align with what I would need either. Discounts on O'Reilly books is not a good enough reason to join the organization. I would expect something much more substantial than that, like job boards or networking of that sort.
Access to the ACM library used to be a pretty good selling point though.
FSFE and the Linux foundation.
But, otherwise, not really.
There's really no benefit to being a member except a feeling of supporting the things that give me a career.
I’m a member of ACM, ACM siggraph, and the London Siggraph chapter (which is its own thing). ACM: the cheaper o’reilly membership is nice, and the acm digital library (which is now more or less free access anyway) is nice to look up papers now and again. London Siggraph has infrequent but very welcome free cinema film screenings in London with Q&As which are super interesting, and a good place to meet other folks who are into computer graphics.