>Having a well-respected professional organization for the programming-classes could help shift the representation of "the tech industry" towards it's people an

>Having a well-respected professional organization for the programming-classes could help shift the representation of "the tech industry" towards it's people and away from it's money, with regards to public debates about data autonomy, open standards, net neutrality, and privacy legislation. Doesn't that already exist in the form of the Association for Computing Machinery (http://www.acm.org/ http://www.acm.org/)? They cover all the areas you mention and more.