Professional Groups and Associations [closed]

After reading How valuable do you find professional memberships? I thought it would be useful to list the various professional groups and associations available.

Discussion of the value (or not) of the groups belongs with the How valuable do you find professional memberships? question.

System Administration Specific

Global

PASS, Professional Association for SQL Server

Australia

SAGE-AU, The System Administrators Guild of Australia

Germany

sage@guug, System Administration Special Interest Group within the German Unix User Group

Ireland

The Systems Administrators' Guild of Ireland, The Systems Administrators' Guild of Ireland

SAGE-IE, The Systems Administrators' Guild of Ireland

(Two groups with the same name and different web sites?)

USA

LOPSA, The League of Professional System Administrators

NPA, Network Professional Association

SAGE, The USENIX Special Interest Group for Sysadmins

Regional

NC*SA, North Carolina System Administrators

IT And Computing in General

Global

ACM, Association for Computing Machinery

IEEE Computer Society, The IEEE Computer Society

Australia

ACS, Australian Computer Society

Canada

CIPS, Canadian Information Processing Society

UK

BCS, British Computer Society

UKUUG, the UK's Unix & Open Systems User Group

USA

USENIX, The Advanced Computing Systems Association

Please add any more that you know of.

Solution 1:

Look for an organization that has an active local chapter. Even large groups like ACM and IEEE Computer Society will be of limited benefit unless you are active. I have found that local chapters make the benefits much greater and offer more opportunities to get involved. That is unless someone is only looking at something to put on a resume.

Solution 2:

Worldwide

PASS - Professional Association for SQL Server

Solution 3:

Worldwide

IEEE Computer Society

Canada

CIPS - Canadian Information Processing Society

Solution 4:

UKUUG, the UK's Unix & Open Systems User Group. They organise a twice yearly conference, training days and seminars, and actively promote and debate open standards with governmental bodies in the UK and EU.