Chairman's Letter

So where does the time go, then, eh?

It really can’t be a year since we took the ferry to Calais and back, for our 2006/7 AGM, in weather rather like today (wet and windy. Must be a bank holiday – oh, yes it is!)

It’s been a year of significant change for BCS, and a year of some change for Kent branch.  The Committee have said goodbye, and thank you, to Andrew Gibbons as our Education Liaison officer.  We welcome Alec Ross to the role.  It really is quite a demanding one, and Alec has taken it up with enthusiasm and some degree of early success.  He has two other volunteers to help him with the schools aspect of the task, and we have formed active relationships with both University of Kent and Canterbury and Christ Church University.  We sponsored the Lego League in Kent last year, and aim to do so again this year.  It’s aimed at both junior and secondary school children (with some help from teachers, I suspect).  It’s called the First Lego League, but that has nothing to do with either primacy or sequence – so don’t be fooled.  It’s “just” the name of the organisation that started the whole thing off.  I think they may be American, so you have to make some allowances.  You can see the 2007 photos here.

The new always gets spotlighted though. I’d also  like to thank Jonathan Exell, Mike Smith, Roger Burnett, Richard Hayward, David White and John Allan for making the committee democratic rather than autocratic.  They may not be new, yet neither are they old.  Just getting more experienced each year.  We need a succession strategy that doesn’t involve incumbents playing “Buggins’ turn” with the mandatory roles.  See plea below!

What else have we done during the past year?  Well, we’ve held 7 events – 8 including the upcoming AGM - all of which you can see at http://www.kent.bcs.org/pastevents.htm.  I have been impressed by the quality of the presentations and the quantity of attendees.  The least we have had is 21 and the most a significant 52 for our AGM and presentation on the Enigma machine.  I’m sure the fact that this latter is being held in the Shepherd Neame brewery has nothing to do with the numbers.

We continue to struggle with both numbers of committee members and frequency of committee meetings.  We have started to open these up – as indeed we have our events – by using tele and web conferencing, and this has been useful for some of our members.  None the less we still tend to live from month to month as far as events are concerned.  I’d really like to publish an annual programme of events, as do some of our sister branches, but I can’t see that happening – well, ever, if I’m honest.  Oh, and talking of sisters, we still have no female committee members simply because none have come forward.  Please do, you will be welcomed.

We seem inadvertently to have provided a forum for Web 2.0 to set the world on fire.  We had our first Web 2.0 presentation From Simon Revell and Scott Gavin, back in April 2007.  They were kind enough to come back and do a reprise in September last year, and now Scott is charging ahead with a one day Web 2.0 bootcamp!  You can get details at http://www.web2uni.co.uk/.  Remember, you heard it at Kent BCS first (and that is first as in primacy).

Having mentioned and thanked, by implication, Simon and Scott, even handedness demands that I also thank Bill Olle, Alan Edgecombe, Paul Offord, Paul Stephens and our own Roger Burnett for their presentations over the past 12 months.  I would also like to thank Bob Eager and Professor Simon Thompson at UoK for their support – a lovely irony running a Windows Vista presentation from Simon’s Apple MacBook.

Finally the usual plea. There are about 1200 BCS members associated with the Kent branch. We average about 30 at events, and some 8 members are active on the committee.  We could do with an injection of fresh metaphorical DNA (I would go with Memes, but I don’t want to be too controversial) so as to get some interesting new ideas going on.  That’s not a lot to ask, is it?

You can contact us at http://www.kent.bcs.org  We hope to see you soon.

Best regards

Jonathan K

Jonathan Killin
Chairman, BCS Kent Branch