The surprising history of ASC

ASC founder Beverley Rowe (pictured centre) in conversation with Randy Banks (L) and Tim Macer (R)

Where did the idea come from to form SGCSA, the group that came before ASC? 

Beverley Rowe:  I was very involved with the British Computer Society [BCS]. They have an elaborate system of special groups.  And I [found myself] next to Sandy Douglas, who was the chairman of something called the technical board. All the specialist groups had a representative on the technical board, and Sandy was the chair. I said, ‘Sandy, why don’t we have a survey analysis specialist group?’ And he said ‘well… start one’. So, we started it.  

I set it up as SGCSA, hoping we’d be a specialist group for the BCS, which we were, and for the Market Research Society, which never really happened, and for the RSS [Royal Statistical Society], which happened even less. I’m not quite sure why.  

Randy Banks:  By the time I encountered you in 1984, it had transmogrified. BCS was still important, but in the background, as well as MRS and RSS.  

Who else was involved at the beginning?  

Beverley: I was its first chair, and actually, we started off in rather a disarray, because there was John Hall, and there was a man from the Market Research Society. He didn’t attend a key meeting when we were to appoint the first officers of SGCSA. They wanted me to be secretary, but I wanted to be chair. So we appointed the MRS man as secretary. 

What did the group do in its first few years? 

Beverley: We had evening meetings and one-day conferences at City University. And there was the publication, of course.   

Was that “Survey Computing”? 

Beverley: Yes. I thought it was rather good. But it was put an end to by the treasurer. I was terribly cross. We had quite a bit of money handy. And he complained that it was costing too much. So we stopped it.  I thought it was a very bad move. 

What were the hot topics of the day? 

Beverley: There were about 50 survey analysis packages around. Why? One of my ambitions in starting the study group was to try to somehow move towards a standard package. But it never happened, of course. SPSS became the standard package, but without our encouragement. I never liked SPSS. 

Randy: But that’s where Triple S eventually came in. I mean, rather than standardise the interface and the functionality, just standardise the data. Or at least provide an interchange standard. 

Beverley: I think we relied on – and had quite a few talks from – people who ran a package. That was our main theme. 

Who made up the audiences at these events? 

Beverley: Academics, of course, and market research people from the technical side. I think we were more geared to developers than users. The one-day conferences at City University were well attended, typically by 30 or 40 people. 

Randy: Remember, this was for the early part, by the time I got involved, up to 130 people [would attend] a one-day conference.  

By 1995 SGCSA realised it wanted to change its name. How did that come about?  

Randy:  Well, before that, certainly. [There were] committee discussions on the change of name. “Study group” didn’t really convey what we were trying to do, which was to be a somewhat broader focus, an umbrella for survey technology. 

Part of the reason for the change was the recognition of “How do we define ourselves?” We wanted to keep on with technology and survey analysis in the broadest definition, also trying to push the notion that, with the advent of technology – I suppose I interpreted this in hindsight – you can go a lot further beyond tabulation, frequency distributions. You can statistically manipulate your data, move your data around. So you had, on the one hand, data handling, on the other hand, modelling of different sorts. 

Was this when you held the first two-day residential or “International Conference”?  

Beverley: Yes. The International Conference was my initiative, really, and I realised we were coming up to our 21st anniversary.   So I pinned it on that. And Hugh Neffendorf [chair at this time] was very supportive, and Andrew Westlake [a former committee member].  

Randy: Oh, Andrew put a lot of work into it.  

Beverley: A lot of planning goes into that. Much more goes into residential conferences, they do involve a lot of planning, but we didn’t have a full-time organiser. 

Randy: We contracted Bev’s sister to organise it. But that first conference, Andrew managed to get Elsevier to publish the proceedings. So we actually made money on it. And it came out hardbound, professionally published.  

We put the conference together and, having never done it before, was a bit of a bugger! But it went well.  

Beverley: Yes, I think it was very successful. 

Randy: It made money. It was [also] intellectually successful. If you look at the programme, I mean, we had representatives from all three sectors, commercial, government, and academic.  

I’m not sure when but the International Conferences became part of our fundraising. And we thought, OK, one-day conference attendance might be going down and we’re going to go skint if we don’t do this. Our income was this, um, jerky thing.  

We tried to turn it into a sine wave by getting sponsorship. A lot of this had to do with defining who we were, and what we’d like to do. The conferences were there, the software register – though that eventually petered out. Then there was a technology award, and that’s still going.  

Do you think the name change helped to move the study group more into a professional association? 

Randy: Throughout my time, we never really lost track of the fact that whatever we are is not entirely well defined. There were many different ways in which we tried to justify our existence, because we thought [what we did] was important. 

Beverley: Andrew [Westlake] was rather fond to say – and he credited it to me – that “ASC is a professional society with no profession”. 

Randy: We were always a group of professionals. It’s just that the SGCSA, the ASC, covered topics that nobody else was concerned with. That was part of the difficulty in defining ourselves, because, well, all sorts of people are not interested in all sorts of things. [We asked ourselves] what are they not interested in that we are.   [What] would bring people together? It was not only data science, because CAPI came along, CATI and various things like that.  

Beverley: Well, of course, data science has come in and is something people talk about now. We’re really a branch of data science, I suppose. 

Randy: And at times we struggled to come up with a topic for a one-day conference, I mean, some things would slip out, because we’d done them a couple [of times]. Remember the software shootouts? 

Beverley: Yes, fun. 

Randy: So we’d have a particular set of tasks, and then we would invite different software suppliers to show how they would accomplish these tasks, to give a comparative basis to people. Because you’re all using this stuff, or at least you’re using one of these. What’s it like in somebody else’s? How do you do it, and so forth? 

And that would be a definite sales pitch, because they’re going, ‘My package is better at doing this than yours is’. 

How did you avoid sessions becoming too salesy? 

Randy: Well, this was comparative sales. We’re going to show you how to do one thing so you can compare it. 

Beverley: We were very chary about people talking about their products. We tried to avoid it. 

Randy: We’d kind of keep that away.  

Are there any things that either of you regret, like missed opportunities or things you would have done differently now? 

Beverley: I would think the connections with MRS and the RSS should have been pursued more vigorously from the beginning. I think the BCS connection was very critical in that respect. Because if you’re involved with this, yes, you actually are involved with computers, and not just in an airy-fairy way. 

What do you think are the things that you’ve gained from this process personally? 

Randy: Well, one thing I learned is I loved the ASC committee, because they were the only meetings I ever went to where decisions were made and things were done.  

Beverley:  I feel very pleased that it still exists. Fifty years later, here we are still talking about it. That’s quite an achievement. 

Beverley Rowe recently celebrated his 91st birthday. You can read more about Beverley on his website at https://www.bevrowe.info/ 

A longer audio recording of this interview is due to be added to ASC’s archive at AMSR later this year.