It is often said that the ability to network and your connections are two of the most important ingredients in determining career success. One of the best ways to incorporate these factors into your career is to join a community. The information security field is no different and in order to succeed it is important to understand what a community is, where this community concept relates to information security, and how leaders can form successful groups. Consultant Wally Bock defines a community as one that has the following three characteristics: common interest, frequent interaction, and identity. From an information security perspective, we are all interested in breaking technology, meet frequently either virtually or in person, and identify ourselves through a number of organizations. Leaders today can take advantage of various web technologies to cook up a successful community through a central portal where members can meet and exchange ideas. Similar to following a recipe in preparing a meal, the successful creation of a community portal involves preparation in terms of proper planning, choosing the right tools (i.e., utensils), populating the portal with the right content (i.e., ingredients), following the directions to combine everything together, and finally regularly advertising.
Grecs has over 15 years experience, undergraduate and graduate degrees in Electrical Engineering, and a really well known security certification. Even though his training was in Electrical Engineering, Grecs has always been more of a Computer Science person at heart going back to his VIC-20, Commodore 64, and high school computer club days. After doing the IT grind for 6 years, he discovered his love of infosec and has been pursuing this ever since. Being a generalist and too afraid to dive into one technology too deep, Grecs's current career passion involves fostering infosec efficiencies through community portals.