AGM Agenda

The AGM was held on Saturday, 15th February 2025 at 10am, in Nantwich, Cheshire. Some members joined us by Teams.

Agenda

1. Apologies

2. Minutes of the Annual General Meeting of 24th February 2024

3. Matters Arising from the Annual General Meeting of 24th February 2024

4. President’s Report

5. Receive the Accounts of the Institution for the Year Ended 31st May 2024

6. Election of Trustees – Paul Lynham FIAP, Graham Fenton FIAP

The meeting started on time, apologies were noted, the minutes of the last AGM were accepted, the accounts were accepted for the tear end 31st May 2024 and Paul Lynham and Graham Fenton were elected as Trustees. The President also presented his report:

Paul, opened talking about Trustworthiness, the value of Trustees, our Volunteers and engagement, in conclusion Paul said: We’re committed to pursuing our vision and delivering meaningful insights to our members and the public. Trust isn’t just a buzzword for us — it’s the foundation of everything we do. For over five decades, the IAP has helped shape software development practices, supported its members, and made lasting contributions to society.

In today’s digital landscape, security can’t be an afterthought. It must be woven into the fabric of software from day one. We refuse to compromise on trustworthiness, and we’re dedicated to giving it the attention it demands. Our strength comes from our members, who represent the best in the profession and who adhere to our strict code of conduct. Combined with our deep connections to government, industry, and academia, plus our 50+ year legacy, we’re uniquely positioned to champion these values. We need to do many things to keep our endeavours going, but trust remains at the core of who we are and what we do.

The AGM meeting closed and was followed by a question-and-answer section with the Director General of the IAP, Alastair Revell.

 

Chairman’s Report, by Paul Lynham

Introduction

The IAP has been in existence for over 50 years and our current challenge is to ensure we can continue in the pursuit of its vision. To achieve this, we will require new ideas and certainly new ways of working, with the need for alternative streams of income and to increase the role of volunteers. None of this will be easy, but great achievements are seldom so.

Project Renaissance is the title of a document that was set out in 2024 for the Executive Board of the Trustees, to identify our ambitions together with some background on how these could be achieved. To enable this project to go forward we will need to recruit new trustees with the skills and drive necessary to take up this challenge.

Trustworthiness

In January 2024 the ITV drama ‘Mr Bates versus the Post Office’ drew public attention to the plight of sub-postmasters and the disastrous results of the poorly developed Horizon system, including loss of life, freedom, dignity, homes, businesses, money and relationships. This situation has been going on for years and many of the victims are still waiting for justice, even though the government has earmarked £1.8 billion of taxpayers’ money in compensation.

Similarly, Dieselgate has been rumbling on for years, with TV and web adverts continually prompting affected people to join compensation action, as although it has been settled in some territories, in others (including the UK) it is ongoing. Over 11 million vehicles were affected and VW were fined €1 billion by the EU. It settled with German consumers for €830 million, but the final cost to the VW group is likely to exceed several billion euros.

On July 19, a global cyber outage hit tens of thousands of air travellers and continued to bring problems in other sectors over several days. It was due to a software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which caused problems for some Microsoft systems.

Last year in both my Chairman’s Report and in last year’s Christmas message, I wrote about trust – it is hard to earn and yet easy to lose. The public may now be more aware of the consequences and the costs of poor-quality software and how vulnerable many aspects of our modern way of living can be impacted. It is more important than ever that we as the IAP persist in our charitable aim of ‘Improving Software for Society’ through the production of trustworthy software.

Trustees

Over 27 years ago, I answered a call to join the IAP council and in June 1997 I attended my first meeting. During the years that followed, I had great satisfaction in helping govern the IAP and became Vice President and then President. During that time the IAP has developed drastically – we transmogrified into a digital organisation, giving up our physical offices, with our staff and volunteers working remotely. In 2018 we became a charity, with some hard work put in by our executive team including our Director General, Alastair Revell, together with our lawyers and was eventually seen over the line with the support of John Ellis. We are continuing to evolve and need to change the way we operate and finance ourselves.

Two years ago, I gave notice to my fellow trustees that I would be stepping down from the Trustee Board, so at the next AGM, I will not seek reappointment. It has been a great honour to be involved with the governance of our organisation, which has considerable influence, especially in the last few years of its 52-year history. I thank everyone who has given support during my 27-year involvement, especially my fellow trustees and admin staff and I wish the IAP continued success in the future.

Advertisements will soon go out to recruit new trustees who can help with our endeavours. Most of these trustees will come from our membership, which we believe represents the cream of our industry, so will have the knowledge and experience to guide the IAP towards these worthy goals. However, we also need some lay trustees who can bring other skills such as income generation and financial management, marketing and social media as well as legal and human resources amongst other areas.

Volunteers

Even though the IAP is a great organisation which is here to help both its members and inform the public, its future success will ultimately lie in the hands of volunteers. In a similar vein to what was said by JFK, members should not ask how the IAP can help them, but how they can help the IAP.

During 2024 we recruited several volunteers and we are grateful to all those who got in touch with us concerning volunteering. We now have a writing pool of authors as well as several who are interested in both presenting and hosting webinars.

We will need to recruit further volunteers who can shadow current personnel and volunteers, so they can take up the reins when required. For example, volunteers who have experience or feel they would be good at running administrative tasks, bookkeeping, production of accounts and social media management would be very welcome.

Engagement

As our charitable goals include educating the public on software, we have continued our policy of presenting free webinars. Anyone interested in software development would have learnt much from our offerings in 2024.

Among them were ‘From Barter to Blockchain: The Evolution and Security Challenges of FinTech’, ‘Programming Provoking Poetry’ which looked at numerous aspects of programming and design through the use of poems and “Next-Gen Software Development: Unleashing Generative AI and Machine Learning”, which looked at how AI can assist software development. The last of the year was ‘ai4all: Demystifying AI For Humans’, demonstrating a cost-effective, potent, locally-hosted AI solution – no going to the cloud.

The IAP is continuing to develop its new website, while the monthly gathering of developers at our DevCafé Rendezvous remains popular. Our YouTube channel has a range of recordings of webinars and interviews and can be found here www.youtube.com/iap-channel.

Conclusion

We’re committed to pursuing our vision and delivering meaningful insights to our members and the public. Trust isn’t just a buzzword for us — it’s the foundation of everything we do. For over five decades, the IAP has helped shape software development practices, supported its members, and made lasting contributions to society.

In today’s digital landscape, security can’t be an afterthought. It must be woven into the fabric of software from day one. We refuse to compromise on trustworthiness, and we’re dedicated to giving it the attention it demands. Our strength comes from our members, who represent the best in the profession and who adhere to our strict code of conduct. Combined with our deep connections to government, industry, and academia, plus our 50+ year legacy, we’re uniquely positioned to champion these values. We need to do many things to keep our endeavours going, but trust remains at the core of who we are and what we do.