Yasas Abeywickrama, President, Computer Society of Sri Lanka (CSSL) explains why CSSL has chosen to increase its level of involvement within IFIP.
The Computer Society of Sri Lanka has been in existence for 40 years, four decades, and we’ve been working with SEARCC and IFIP for a very long time. As the Sri Lankan IT industry grows and connects globally, we have to be globally connected as well. So we started to become more active with IFIP since 2013-14 and then there was this opportunity coming through where I could get onto the IFIP Board and we thought that’s really important and would influence the way we work with the world and over the last couple of years it really has.
It has given us access to other parts of the world and it has helped our industry to connect with speakers, connect with academics, connecting professionals and all that. Because the local industry it’s gearing towards the export market. In a small country there’s so much you could do locally so you have to export software to other countries so when you do that you need all that international connections to come in.
So I hope the the board position has helped us in opening those avenues. Also in the last couple of months we’ve got the opportunity to host the IFIP General Assembly in Sri Lanka in 2017 September which will bring 70 plus top class professionals, academics to Sri Lanka.
They’ll speak at our national IT conference as well and we’ll organise a series of business meetings, academic meetings, so we’ve actually created an opportunity for our country by using this board position.
