How We Work
The association runs on two rhythms: daily discussion in forums open to every member, and a general online meeting each quarter. Ideas start in the first and are tested in the second, where we decide which ones the association will back. More than 1,500 professionals worldwide keep it running.
| Daily forum | Quarterly meeting | |
|---|---|---|
| Who takes part | Any member, any time | All members, convened |
| What it is for | Raising, arguing, stress-testing | Deciding what gets backed |
| What it produces | Work in development | Association positions, minuted |
| Filter | None — everything is allowed in | Three months of prior argument |
The daily forum
This is where most of the real work happens.
Any member can raise a problem from their sector, describe a job they see under threat, propose a way to support the person doing it, or pull apart someone else's proposal. An engineer who has solved an assistance problem on a factory floor finds a professional from an entirely different field who recognises the same pattern in their own.
That mix is deliberate. Much of what the association has produced over the years came out of a collision between someone who knows how to build systems and someone who knows a trade from the inside. Neither would have got there alone.
The quarterly meeting
Every three months the association meets online, open to all members.
It is not a briefing. It is a decision meeting. The lines that gained traction in the forum over the quarter are gathered, argued out properly, and a call is made on which ones deserve the association's backing, in what form and at what priority. Conclusions go into the minutes.
That quarterly rhythm does something useful: it forces an idea to survive three months of argument before it becomes an association position. What cannot survive that stays in the forum, which is where it belongs.
What "backing" actually means
When a proposal gets support, the association offers the one thing it genuinely has and that is hard to find anywhere else: access to people.
An engineer who wants to build an assistance tool for a trade they do not know finds practitioners of that trade willing to explain it. A professional watching replacement arrive in their field finds someone who can build the alternative. And both find someone who has already walked that road in another sector.
We do not fund projects and we do not sell anything. We connect, we argue, and we back.
The sector calls
There is one type of call we keep repeating.
In industry, the association has enough experience to defend specific jobs with specific arguments. In other sectors we are not there yet — simply because AI arrived later, and because we lack members who know those fields from the inside.
So we run open calls to professionals in legal services, accounting and audit, software development, customer support, design, healthcare, teaching, architecture and engineering. The question we put to them is always the same: which part of your job is execution, and which part is judgement? Everything else follows from that answer.
Why the model holds
Associations like this usually fail one of two ways. They become an opinion forum with no consequence, or they get captured by whoever funds them.
Our design tries to block both. The quarterly filter stops discussion from turning into noise, because ideas have to mature and then be decided. And having no commercial interest and no vendor ties stops the agenda being set by whoever is selling.