* Communications: people from PR, marketing or publishing backgrounds with a focus on producing content for the web
* IT backgrounds
* Web developers
* People who’ve fallen into it as they happened to be there when this whole internet lark took off.
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I’d also include design background in that list. A lot of web professionals started as graphic or front end designers and are now moving more towards User Experience roles.

Professions are basically jobs that are controlled by collective bodies and it usually results in people performing to certain standards in order to satsify the rules of the collective. This means you may not get an incompetent service from a professional practitioner, or that you can request sanctions if you do. Except for a few lines of work, I feel it also seems to make inspiring and passionate practitioners rarer. Are sexy solicitors and evangelical accountants the norm?

It’s fairly rare now that I see an utterly incompetent ukgov web service, but few of them are inspiring and it seems like most of the webmasters do the bare minimum for competence. If anything, I’d say they’re more often too professional, following policies and rules without any passion. Wouldn’t adding a professional body make this worse?

Recently I’ve heard that one of my local councils has got rid of most of its web editors and handed control to the departmental staff because they actually care about the content. Unfortunately, this seems to mean that we still don’t have anyone who actually cares about the web applications.

So are we actually seeking professionalism or something more like recognition of the skills we actually want to see among webmasters and representation to higher level decision-makers? I think so, therefore I want better representative bodies, rather than new professional bodies.

What’s wrong with our representation? Why aren’t the current bodies being heard? Well, with my non-council hat on, I’ve been looking at various bodies for webmasters recently. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious choice yet. I found ones that were too general, trapped in a niche, too expensive or undemocratic.

For example, SOCITM appears to be democratic, but covers all computing without visible grouping (there appear to be groups, but the external face is SOCITM not the groups), it doesn’t cover the private sector (our main client base) and their corporate fee is higher than what we pay our national cooperative body! If SOCITM wants to help, I feel it would be a better improvement to fix some or all of those drawbacks, rather than push towards establishing themselves as a professional body and effectively giving SOCITM a captive membership.

Anyway, I’m getting frustrated thinking about this again, so . Hope someone reads this and finds it helpful.

Looking forward to your notes from the other sessions.