We have, amongst our fraternity, an exciting, wonderful and stimulating diversity. Accreditation is meant to embrace that diversity without engendering an elitist, or restrictive entry process.
Nor is accreditation meant to enshrine mediocrity.
Nor should accreditation be so paper bound a process as to make it unviable or frustrating to belong to. An example? Apply for a NSW security license.
An accreditation process must be firm enough to reject membership, righteous enough to justify rejection, and compassionate enough to assist in raising inadequacy to competent membership. An accreditation process must also be strong enough to recognise education and or experience, and entitle the holders of those to immediate conferring of rank. The system must provide flexible and effective means to creating those adequate skills. It must encourage and promote advancement, and recognise achievement.
The system must provide a useful and reliable benchmark that industry and particularly, recruitment agents can quickly and easily understand. It should be graded, clearly and concisely. It should be rigorous, defensible and very usable when pushing our agendas to industry, especially recruitment agents.
I think a formal education process could be a good idea.
Sponsoring university post graduate research about technical communication would be an excellent long term goal.