Introverted Leadership Mentor
Collaborating Securely: Protecting Your Community and Yourself
I had the privilege of presenting Collaborating Securely: Protecting Your Community and Yourself to a room full of community leaders from the Society for Technical Communication.
Technical Communications Skills Map | Red Gate Software Development.
Have you wondered about the job possibilities available to you as a technical communicator? This skills map by Brian Harris provides a great view of where core techcomm skills can take you. (Please note that the original post is no longer available. I’ve linked to a higher-resolution image Kai Weber saved.)
Are there any areas you would add? For me, information security fits into both domain expertise and risk management.
The Society for Technical Communication provides a great place to learn about techcomm and develop the networking connections to take you along your career path. If you’re interested in techcomm, check us out.
I’m delivering the presentation below as part of a progression at Summit 2013 Leadership Day in Atlanta. Summit Leadership Day provides STC community leaders with the knowledge and guidance they need to lead successful communities, both geographic chapters and SIGs.
Volunteers are the heart of the community. They enable us to offer meaningful services to our members. However, getting volunteers can be challenging. Issuing a cattle call doesn’t usually lead to good results. Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y all have different priorities that you must consider when recruiting them.
Personally, I’ve found volunteering in leadership in my local chapter (Rochester) to be one of the most rewarding experiences of my professional career. Volunteering has stretched me and equipped me as a better leader. I don’t have a magic formula. However, STC Rochester fills 8-10 council positions each year. That’s more than 10% of the community engaged in leadership.
This presentation provides strategies and tactics for recruiting and retaining volunteers.
My thoughts on one of the challenges facing infosec offices in higher education. It reflects my thoughts, and not necessarily those of my employer.
The institutional challenge of creating centralized cost-effective efficiencies in an environment with a strong tradition of localized, decentralized IT solutions and personnel is normative in higher education.
An Information Security Office can create centralized efficiencies by:
This past fall we had the privilege of visiting Pont du Gard, a Roman bridge and aqueduct in Languedoc in the south of France. Although built primarily without mortar (except for the top course of blocks), Pont du Gard has endured for more than 2000 years, despite frequent spring floods.
The Pont du Gard aqueduct/bridge was built to provide clean water for the town of Nimes. Its builders understood the importance of building a structure that took into account the factors that would affect the bridge. They understood at least some of the pressures that would bear on that structure. They built the bridge accordingly. Its builders designed it to endure.
Geographical map of the aqueduct of the Pont du Gard. Map created using data from OpenStreetMap. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
So, this blog is about communications. What does the Pont du Gard have to do with communications?
Much of my role as a technical communicator has been to build processes that enable the flow of good communication. I’ve had to factor in the context (pressures that will bear on the structure) in which I was building those processes. Those communications processes are the bridges (aqueducts) that I build. In distributed organizations, well built communications bridges are critical to the health of the organizations.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to talk about bridge building. First, I’ll discuss my initial attempts at architecting communications processes for a Fortune 500 organization that had outsourced key support processes in the midst of a major software/hardware infrastructure transformation. Next, I’ll discuss communications processes I’ve built in my role as an information security practitioner in higher education. Finally, I’ll talk about my current work to build a sustainable communications bridge that enables clear communications between a central organization and its distributed communities, ensures the concerns of those distributed communities are heard, and facilitates best practice sharing among those communities.
