Mark Curphey - SecurityBuddha.com

First off an apology. When we started the ISM-Community in January, there was lots of interest and initial activity. Lots of people wanted to start projects and start chapters and we quickly realized it would have become very unmanageable with the way we had the portal organized, especially for chapters. We put it on freeze for the last month while we built out the site and structured it in a way that it can grow without collapsing under its own weight in a few months or get chaotic. The good news is its almost all complete now and the site is open for business again.

http://www.ism-community.org

Organization and Projects

We decided to organize into focus areas, each one having a leader, a blog, discussion forum / mailing list and a file storage area. Each focus area can then host discussions and work on projects. They are all looking for active participants.

We have five areas initially;

- Risk Management - Michael Smith

- Identity and Privacy - Karen Lawrence Oqvist

- Polices ad Standards - Mark Curphey

- Training Awareness - Tim smith

- Commons - Mark Curphey

Licensing

We have decided to adopt the FreeBSD documentation licenses that means everything is open for everyone to use however they wish with virtually no restrictions whatsoever.

Portal

You can register for a free account on the portal to post but you don’t need to if you just want to follow along. The forums will be upgraded to a combination of forums that are also a mailing list sometime next week. This gives us the best of both worlds. Mailing list or BBS but it’s really the same and your choice! We also have blogs for each focus area leader and file storage for projects.

Sponsorship

There are now sponsorship opportunities at every level; corporate to personal. All money will be ploughed back into the community to work on projects, much like OWASP does through its grant giving system.

Chapters Management

This weekend we will start using an application to manage local chapters. People will be able to create a chapter and arrange meetings online and others can then find local chapters and browse the meetings and archives (presentations etc). You can even get updated about meetings by RSS and calendars integration. It should make running and participating in a chapter a pleasure and as we can simply retire chapters automatically that don’t setup meetings etc within 15 days of forming online we won’t have stale or inactive chapters.

Various projects are starting now and looking for volunteers so we really hope you will come and join the community!

http://www.ism-community.org