The Security Catalyst

This morning we closed the collaborative mind mapping project to map out the Advancement of How We Practice Security. I am excited to share with you that we had contributions and inputs from passionate professionals around the world contribute. As a result, this is a solid start on where, as a profession, we need to consider aligning our time, talents, and resources.

I have been a fan of mind mapping for non-linear thinking (and thinkers) for a while now. I was pleasantly surprised (though perhaps I shouldn’t have been) by how many others also are drawn to mind mapping. We had more people engaged and more countries represented than I expected. I can honestly share with you that I am blown away by the results of this effort - and believe we have a healthy framework to start developing.

I exported the map from mindmeister this morning. I was impressed by the effort that the development team there has put into this offering. The only big drawback was the way the information needed to be sorted. I took the exported map this morning and then “cleaned” it up by moving a few branches (especially the ones that said “new branch”) and then allowed my software to resort and resize the map. It’s a fairly dense map that was described (accurately) as a “wall of words.”

Outside of my contributions to this process, I have not altered any ideas or the fabric of what what shared. Here is what our combined effort looks like (png format):

What did I learn from this experience?

• Mind mapping truly is a powerful method to bring forth ideas
• Collaborative mind mapping _can_ work, but requires some structure in advance
• Allowing a collaborative tool around a specific topic allows ideas and inputs from around the world
• too many people and too much time leads to “a wall of words”
• the future of security and how we practice is looks engaging and is something I want to be part of

Care to share some ideas - I’d love to hear from you (contribute to the comments, or send me an email).

What’s next for our effort?
One of the elements of mind mapping that works for me is to let the map sit a bit, and then revisit it to either clean it up, or to start a new one and leverage the previous work (depends on how complex the map is, and how much effort it will take to reorganize my thoughts). I’d like to follow a similar approach here. That said, I’m not quite sure how to do that with a distributed group (and I have a lot on my plate right now). It seems to me that a small team of 3-5 to do the bulk of the work would be the easiest to manage for this round.

The goal of this “refinement stage” is to take the current map and build it out into a framework suitable for wiki-style development. If you have some ideas on how we can refine the map, want to lead the team or desire to participate, please send me an email (securitycatalyst@gmail.com) with your suggestions and qualifications.

How the Security Catalyst Community Will Support this Effort
We’re nearing the point where we can launch a centralized and authenticated jabber chat server (we’re pushing to have that done by the end of the month). Once that has been completed and launched, we’re turning our attention to “securitypedia” - a publicly viewable wiki for the members of the security catalyst community to develop, refine and share ideas.

This mind map will provide the structure for a discussion on the future of security, and eventually for a series of wiki pages to help provide a blue print for where we need to spend some time, allocate some training dollars and guide some research and development.

Once the wiki is in place and operational (I do not currently have an estimated timeframe), we’ll work to establish a small team to carry this effort forward. If you are interested in helping to carve out the vision for the future of how we practice security, send me a note at securitycatalyst@gmail.com and I’ll include you on a working group list. I suspect this will end up being a summer project, but I do hope that we are able to get it off the ground during Q2.

Here is a PDF version of the map: catalyst security.pdf

If you want this in either OPML format or would prefer some other method by which you can manipulate it, drop me a note and I’ll do my best to get you what you need (provided you give credit where credit is due and share your results back with the community).

Thanks for making this experiment a complete success. The beginning is almost here. Are you excited?

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