Each year, ACS bestows Honorary Life Membership to individuals who have demonstrated exceptional and distinguished service to ACS for at least 10 years.

This year, ACS has awarded four individuals this honour.

Michael Driver

Over the last 12 years, Michael Driver has been an active ACS member. His most recent and far reaching contribution has been as sponsor of the Digital Business Strategy (DBS) over the last two years. This has transformed the ACS’s connection with its members and has, in the process, provided a huge and much needed transformation in the ACS systems which collect, process and report on member data. Driver has also been a long-term and highly engaged champion of professional development and mentoring over the last decade. He has concurrently been a highly active Queensland BEC member and Vice-Chair. Over the last two years, he has served as National Vice- President (Membership Boards) and has been elected as the incoming chair of the Queensland Branch.

Michael Hawkins

In 10 years, Michael Hawkins has made a substantial contribution to ACS. His term as Director of the Membership Lifecycle and Marketing Board saw him lead the society to re-brand itself after 40 years, introducing a new look and a new culture to the society nationally. As National Congressional Representative member of Management Committee, Michael has led significant projects, shifting the ACS website infrastructure to new technology approaches twice, leading the highly successful 50th Anniversary celebrations. He currently leads the Heritage Committee which oversaw the publication of a book on the history of computing in Australia. At the branch level, Michael has been a visionary leader of the branch, and delivered successful annual conferences, variously as chair and key organising committee member for years, and is a driving force in the mentoring program’s operation in Canberra and nationally.

Jan Kornweibel

Jan Kornweibel joined ACS in May 1967, having already been active the WA Computer Society before the West Australian Computer Society merged into the national society. Over the next five decades, Kornweibel made an outstanding contribution to ACS through her active participation. She was a female pioneer role-model from the onset, and was the first female BEC member, as well as the first female ACS Branch Chair in Western Australia. She gave 16 years of service to the WA Branch Executive Committee. From the mid-1970s she laid the foundations for establishing recognition for Computing with Disability. She started the first Special Interest Group for computing to assist disabled people, and was at the forefront of instituting the early recognition and awareness of a range of accessibility issues in WA. Kornweibel was instrumental in coordinating the first ACS national conference in Western Australia, and has continued to mentor females. She continues to serve in accessibility, and is an important contributor to the establishment of software testing for students on the Autism Spectrum.

Alan Bell

For more than 50 years, Alan Bell has made an outstanding contribution to ACS through his active and engaged membership. He was a pioneer of computing in Victoria and an active member of the Victoria Computer Society in the early 1960s. He was also instrumental in the formation of ACS in 1966. He served on the ACS Victorian Branch Executive Committee for 10 years, becoming Vice Chairman in 1973 and Chairman in 1974-1975. He contributed to the ACS relationship with IFIP, and served on the 1980 World Congress Organising Committee held jointly in Melbourne and Tokyo in 1980. He continued to contribute to ACS throughout the 1990s as the organiser of a number of ACS-aligned IT conferences.

ACS congratulates our four Honorary Lifetime Members for 2017.