References

John Dickson

John Dickson is the founder, managing director, head cook and bottle washer, of Caversham Computer Services Ltd, a company dedicated to research and development in Systems Engineering.

Since joining the nascent computing industry in 1967, he has always been at the leading edge of systems research and development, but with an emphasis on the practicalities of transferring the results into the "real" world. As a result he has often suffered the fate of all prophets of being "without honour in his own country". In the early 1970's his introduction of programming methodologies which were the precursors of object-orientation and XP, proved to be 25 years ahead of their time. His paper "Project Management: A New Agenda" was one of the keynote papers of the 1984 conference of the International Project Management Association, but the ideas in it similarly disappeared without trace for a decade.

Since 1995 he has been tracking the evolution and problems of the emerging world-wide web, and developing his views on a new systems architecture, a "collaborative network", as a means of deploying a different kind of global information system hosted on the internet. He hopes that people will take a bit more notice this time.

He has always seen the use of computers as being enabling technology for organisational and social change, and is increasingly involved in working with non-commercial groups in finding ways in which they can leverage collaborative networking (whether computer based or not) for their mutual benefit.

Will Dickson

Will Dickson is the CTO, arch-programmer, security / crypto paranoid-in-chief, occasional BOFH and very occasional programmer-artist of Caversham Computer Services Ltd, which John Dickson's bio has more to say about.

He started playing with computers longer ago than he cares to remember, and joined CCS after a diversion into Physics, during which he learned that equations are not necessarily scary, failed to shake off the habit of writing convoluted run-on sentences such as this one, and learned how to write FORTRAN, but thankfully only in FORTRAN. He also discovered that he was far more interested in developing things than in research.

He goes along with most of John's ideas about computers, and has some related ones of his own.