In this day and age, almost every association needs a website. Prospective members check out the association by visiting the website. Members use the website as their source of information about the association. Association management communicates to the members, and to the public, through the website. For all but the smallest associations, there’s no getting away from the need for a website.

It’s been over a year since I last collected my thoughts about IT certification. That process led to my first “The Certification Challenge” blog entry. This entry sketches my current thinking on the subject.

Certification & Licensing

No Content Management System, Drupal included, is well positioned to provide the “back end” that an association needs to manage its members, events, and stakeholders. But there is a Customer Relationship Management application, designed for non-profit associations, that works with Drupal. CiviCRM is an open source back end association management application that has been designed to integrate into the Drupal platform.

In the beginning there were raw html pages. Real web page designers used something like NotePad to directly edit the html tags. That did work, and there are still raw html editors available - they let you work with html tags and provide easy reference to the full range of tag and style sheet options. If all you want to do is edit single web pages, working with the raw html can be both efficient and effective (assuming you understand tags and css).

IT Professional societies have struggled to identify a meaningful Body of Knowledge that should be mastered by all IT Professionals. The two leading US societies for IT Professionals, the ACM and the IEEE-CS, cooperated in the development of a major Computing Curriculum Report (CC2005). This report provides a useful graphical view of the “Problem Space of Computing”. They developed a two-dimensional model, with a theoretical-to-applied horizontal dimension, and five vertical areas of concentration. It was represented as: