Earlier today, October 28, I was priviledged to give a talk at the National Defense Industrial Association about Social Network & Cybersecurity.
My focus was to review why Social Network has taken off in the last few years and what implications for the future based on those conclusions. I also briefly reviewed Cloud Computing using some of Peter Mell’s slides from his presentation at the same conference on Monday, with his permission of course.
I had three major points.
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I have always taken pride, deserved or not, about being pretty progressive if that is the right word about gender issues.
For example, one of the proud moments in my younger political career happened when I was active in College Republican politics in the state of Maryland. One of the young women active in the Notre Dame club, a college in Baltimore, told me that even though we generally were on different sides, she always respected me. The reason was that unlike most of the other male CRs I treated her the same that I treated male CRs. I expected her to keep her word, to work hard, and on and on. Most others expected less from her because she was ‘cute’, which she was.
Ignoring for a moment that one reason I treated her the same was as much due to my social ineptness as anything else, I would say that I tried to carry that goal of equity to my professional life pretty consistently.
But that is not why I am posting this.
One of my standard comments about gender has been to note that in my house there are almost all women, my wonderful wife and two amazing, now college graduated, daughters. The only other male over the course of my marriage was a neutered male cat. I tell people that each day my goal over those twenty-some years has been to avoid doing whatever it was that caused that cat to end up like that.
When I last told that story a few days ago, Liz Renninger’s, http://www.linkedin.com/pub/liz-renninger/0/460/661, immediate response was “Well, I guess you failed.”
And thus one of my favorite stories about myself may have to be retired.
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For those who came in late, ACT-IAC, http://www.actgov.org/Pages/default.aspx, one of the larger organizations enabling Government and Industry IT to be able to informally interact and learn from each other, holds an Executive Leadership Conference, ELC, each year.
This year ELC is being held October 25-27 in Williamsburg, VA, http://www.actgov.org/events/ExecutiveLeadership/ELC%202009/Pages/default.aspx.
On Monday, October 26, most of the day is taken up by panels organized into four tracks. I had the privilege to chair along with Eric Won of GSA, one of the tracks focused on Infrastructure and Cloud Computing.
This post will provide an overview of what we intended to accomplish during the course of the track and thus why we made the decisions we made in creating the panels. My discussion at the beginning of the track will in large part echo what I write here, subject to any suggestions made by my vast reading audience.
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This is a copy of the article that I wrote for the Public Manager, reprinted here with their permission, originally published October, 2008 ; http://thepublicmanager.org/cs/blogs/featured/archive/2008/10/14/government-2-0-fact-or-fiction.aspx.
I, and the other authors that contributed similar articles making predictions and/or providing some thoughts about the then upcoming Obama Administration, are in the process of writing brief updates based on how the first year has gone.
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I was lucky enough to be part of a panel discussing cyber-security at a Fedscoop conference Wednesday, October 14, at the Newseum. The agenda for the conference is here: http://fedscoopevents.com/agenda.php. I thought it might be useful to summarize my general points for those who were not able to attend.
The theme of the conference was Lowering the Cost of Government with Technology though the panel’s comments ranged from cost issues to government 2.0 and social networking to cyber-security in general.
The panel was moderated by Chris Dorobek, the afternoon co-anchor for WFED. The other panelists included Vance Hitch, the Department of Justice CIO, Pat Howard, the Chief Information Security Officer, CISO, for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Dr. Ron Ross, a key figure in defining security requirements and policy at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, Gary Galloway, the Deputy Director for Information Assurance at the Department of State, and Rue Moody, the Director of Strategic Technology at Citrix.
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This weekend my wife, Ellen, and I decided to spend the weekend at a B&B in Gettysburg, swinging through Antietam on the way home Sunday. She had never visited and I hadn’t been in a long time.
The area is really beautiful this time of year, the B&B is very nice (out of town so pretty quiet), we enjoyed walking around a bit late this afternoon and early evening and plan to be battlefield tourists the next two days.
One side note, the ice cream at Kirwin’s, which I am happy to report was started before I was born, an increasingly unlikely situation, and which evidently is a chain, was very good.
We noticed that in the sort-of-farm next door there were two chickens and a horse. It turns out that the two chickens belonged to the neighbor’s first wife and thus we learned the backstory here, in the outskirts of Gettysburg.
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I recently attended the annual conference of the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, http://natoa.org/events/annual-conference/2009/. NATOA is a national trade association representing local governments. It includes both elected and appointed officials and staff who oversee communications and cable television franchising.
It was great interacting with the attendees and hearing the kinds of issues that local officials face, as well as spending a little bit of time in New Orleans, where the meeting was held. It was the first time I was in New Orleans.
The panel I served on discussed Government 3.0, what it might be, and some of the issues associated with it.
My major points were that the ‘classical’ description of 3.0 has been that the next step is to implement what is called the Semantic Web. The term is generally used to mean that the web will understand its own content and with that knowledge allow more robust searches and interactions. I call it the “Return what I want, not what I ask for” web. I expressed some skepticism about the likelihood of this happening.
I pointed out that there was much to do with the old-fashioned Government 2.0 approach, which still is very young. And I brought up my favorite topic, the integration of fast sensors into networks and its implications to local and state government.
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Note: what follows was a document I prepared for my Syracuse University class, I would be interested in any feedback on its contents either in the comments section or sending me an email at dmintz@ourownlittlecorner.com. Thaanks.
One of the first discussion topics for our class dealt with an excerpt from one of our textbooks relating to where the security function should report within an organization.
The excerpt said “In these cases, the information security manager generally reports directly or indirectly to the CIO but in some cases may report to the CFO or, unfortunately, even to Operations.”
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This Week
Before I get to the topic of this blog entry, sensors, I wanted to mention that I have been privileged to play a small role in the Government 2.0 Expo, www.gov2expo.com, occurring Tuesday, September 8th, and the Government 2.0 Summit, www.gov2summit.com, occurring Wednesday and Thursday, all at the DC Convention Center.
The fact that so many people around the country are interested in experimenting with 2.0 technologies to improve the way Government interfaces to its external and internal stakeholders and in a fundamental fashion rethink how it should operate, is wonderful.
Democracies only work well when there is vigorous debate and participation in the public square. I encourage anyone who reads this blog, recently calculated in the ten’s of viewers, to access these web sites and get active in future such activities.
Sensors
One of the ways to look at the development of Information Technology is the increased capabilities of fast computers, fast networks and fast sensors.
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As those who know me know, I have become very interested in the archaeology of the Bible. By Bible, I mean the Hebrew Bible.
My personal opinion is that faith is just that, faith. To me, faith does not have to be ‘proven’ by the historicity of religious texts or disproven by the lack of same. My interest has pretty much nothing to do with my Jewish beliefs, but rather curiosity as to whether the historic record is consistent or inconsistent, or has any evidence at all, related to the Bible as history. There has been a lot of new information collected over the last twenty years and the ability to interpret the material already collected has increased enormously. Thus there is lots to read and think about.
Over time, my interests stray a bit from that original focus and have moved to early Christianity and on to the middle ages and Islam, covering what I call the three major Abrahamic religions. When I talk about, and I guess write about, these thoughts I do find myself more cautious when discussing Christianity or Islam, since as a Jew I sometimes feel how my thoughts will be taken, which I try to always disassociate with faith and belief, may be misinterpreted.
A discussion about the Edict of Milan after the jump …
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