Local Government - IT/InfoSec Commission Board Creation (Ideas and Suggestions)

Privacy / Security
1

Hey DLN Friends,

In my local (small) city, we have many community volunteer commission boards related to various areas necessary for a positive and community focused needs. One area that we are lacking is an IT/InfoSec community commission board.

In the past, I am told by longer residing residents of my city, there was an IT Commission Board but it was later dismantled due to “concerns of sharing too many internal IT policies, plans, and procedures with the open public.” While this could be the reason, I wasn’t living in this city as the time of the board or the later dismantling of this board.

Where I live and in my state, I am a very active community volunteer (both locally in my city, regionally, and state wide). Part of my next focus is to help the city move forward with creating a new IT/Infosec Community Commission Board.

This is a new area for me to suggest to a local government. As such, before I approach the City Council and City Manager, I am doing some IT community pings seeking advice from those who have already done such in their local or state or other, communication roadblocks experienced, and other hurdles that either blocked or were overcome.

Fortunate for my location, we have a major university. My overall goal is to find a way to integrate the city with the university via this board so that we can support more theoretical as well as practical based knowledge for those who will be in the seats upon this future commission.

Thanks DLN Team!

2 Likes
2

Kudos for being active in your community.

In my area almost the entirety of this domain is governed by sunshine laws. Records such as property ownership, taxes, emails, voter registration, agendas, meetings, etc are publicly available. The history of human nature doesn’t have a good track record of maintain integrity while operating in secret. There was a very recent push locally to record IEP (Individualized Education Program) meetings held among school staff who would be determining the best route for a particular child’s learning abilities. It was posited that bias was being introduced into the meetings. The proposed solution was to record the meetings and make them available to all impacted individuals.

Could you unpack in more detail what you see the board doing? Is the purpose of the board to implement newer tech? or perhaps explore ways to prevent crippling attracts e.g. ransomware? or perhaps to limit open source intelligence?