BCS SIGiST’s Summer Conference 2023 was a great success. We had more speakers and more attendees than at our previous conference. Everyone I spoke to enjoyed the conference and asked when the next one would be.
I got a real buzz from the day of the conference! It was great to hear so many great speakers and meet so many talented testing professionals!
SIGiST’s conference can be described as voluntarism, self-development and mutual development.
When Kaoru Ishikawa explained the basic ideas behind Quality Circles he referred to voluntarism, self-development and mutual development.[1]
The conference was about voluntarism. The BCS SIGiST committee which organised the conference are all volunteers, and all the speakers volunteered their time.
The conference was about self-development too. Each of us participating in the event wanted to learn and develop ourselves. We all learned from the presentations. When I speak at a conference I learn a lot from from preparing and giving my presentation. I am sure that the speakers at SIGiST23 also learned in this way. As the SIGiST Programme Secretary, I learned about the importance of reserve speakers. The conference programme was designed to give a balance of themes and a balance between male and female speakers. Our reserve speakers enabled this balance to be maintained when speakers had to withdraw.
The conference was also about mutual development. We all learned from each other. We learned, not only from the presentations but also from the connections we made in the networking sessions. The exchange of ideas enabled us to gain broader perspectives on our work.
I would like to thank the BCS SIGiST Committee members, the presenters, the BCS staff who supported the committee and the conference sponsors Keysight Technologies.
BCS SIGiST Committee:
Nicola Martin Beth Clarke EngTech MBCS MIET Paul Mowat Adam Leon Smith FBCS Laveena Ramchandani Andrew Shaw MBCS Mihai Grigorescu Jonathon Wright Geoff Thompson
Conference Speakers:
Simon Prior Colin Hammond Divyeshkumar Patel Petros Plakogiannis Leela A.Putten Dan Ashby Nadia Soledad Cavalleri Beth Marshall Peter Johnson Dr Carl Adams Shajahan Pulikkal Hristina Koleva Arun Kumar Dutta Riya Dennis David Maynard Abigail Bangser Steve Mellor (MBCS) Paul Gerrard
The British Computer Society is a “not-for-profit”, which promotes wider social and economic progress through the advancement of information technology science and practice. I would encourage you to join: https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/become-a-member/
References
[1] What is Total Quality Control? The Japanese Way by Kaoru Ishikawa
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