Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

• Vast chasm between what consumers understand the web to be and what is required of us to build the web.

• Mum doesn’t need to know XML, XHTML et all to get online, post photos, have a blog. This is fantastic and needs to remain.
• The chasm has gotten worse since the early days of the web. The consumer is being bombarded with web 2.0, AJAX; have grown to expect these new features/approaches for the old prices. We are many years into this industry and yet the consumer still isn’t educated in what is required to build quality sites.
• How man people here only do one thing every day? (No one raises hand) We are the tribe of many hats
• Lawyers, Doctors, other professions required to get further education every year in order to keep up with developments in their industry. All we have for that in our industry are workshops like Web Directions.
• We still have the problem of people just into web development for the quick buck, with little thought for quality; esp. relating to standards.
• General Practitioners are GP’s everywhere – our industry does not have any formalized titles, causing many people with the same duties to have very different titles, growing confusion.
• Certification – there is great concern regarding proving web skill-sets; currently have to be proven through past work, yet prospective employers basically only want to see a piece of paper. It is extremely difficult and expensive for certification/education to keep up with developments in the industry.
• Professional organizations such as WaSP, WSG, Port:80 and many others are the type of groups that could be the birthplace of relevant certification.
• There is a huge disparity between working people of the world and the academics in the ivory tower. (primarily relating to the W3C.)
• wipa.org.au – New industry group put together by Russ Weakley and Peter Firminger and will hopefully be addressing some of the issues raised by Molly – specific to Australia.
• WaSP sub-group International Liason Group formed to produce resources in as many languages as possible.
• The Professionalism, when it comes, has to come with certain value systems – who and how do we determine what our ethics are?
• Quotes from the audience regarding ethical values: First do no harm, Don’t abuse the trust of your community, Don’t lock your client into coming back, make them want to come back.

[tags]wd06, web directions, Molly Holzschlag[/tags]