"Community" interface - topics

[rslade]

Another thing that is annoying about the "community" is that, when you want to make a post, you have an extremely limited set of categories (they are called "Locations" or "Boards") to post under.

Available "Boards" are "Customer Support," "Certifications," "Chapters," "Welcome," "Career," "GDPR," "Industry News," or "Security Congress."  There is a "Show All..." option, which shows you that support, certs, and chapters are grouped under "ISC2 Exchange;" welcome, career, GDPR and news are grouped under "Discussions;" and events lists a whole one item--the congress.  (There is also a grouping called "Research," but you can't choose it, and it doesn't have anything under it.)

So, if I want to talk about quantum cryptography, does that come under customer support?  Is risk management part of my career?  What if I want to talk about a security framework other than GDPR?  I'd like to research this issue.  (Oh, wait.  I can't.)

[rslade]

Oh, and following a suggestion, I looked at the ways to sort "Hot Topics."  The options are "Top Kudoed," which I don't like, "Recent Activity," which seems possibly useful, and, very oddly, "Solved."  So, did ISC2 just buy somebody's not-terribly-good customer service Website, and change the logo?

[rslade]

Supposedly there are "blogs," but I haven't been able to find them.  (Or, then again, maybe I have.  I notice that while all of us plebs get postings where you can "reply," the admins on the system seem to be able to post things where you can "comment."  Is this the difference?  The admins have some secret, and not for us mere members, button that allows them to blog, rather than post?  Enquiring minds want to know!)

[Baechle]

Brah. 😕

[SamanthaO_isc2]

Hello!  

*Quick housekeeping note here, I noticed that you posted feedback about a few different Community features as their own topics. In my reply to this post, we hit on all these different topics, so I am going to reply to all questions here and merge them together to avoid sending multiple notifications for each individual reply.*

Currently, there are a few places in the Community that are available to (ISC)² Staff only - like the (ISC)² Updates blog and the Workforce Study area under Research. These areas are locked down so that the messages coming through these places can be seen as official from the (ISC)² organization. 

This brings up blogs, which you mentioned in another post. We do have one blog formatted board, (ISC)² Updates. This is currently the only one we have and it is new to the Community, it was just launched last week. The need for this arose out of us wanting to be able to post important information to the Community and having the appropriate place to do just that. We did not want to start posting topics in areas that were meant for more peer to peer discussion and potentially deflect any engagement by talking about changes in the Community, new badges, or what is happening at (ISC)².  I am curious if you would like to be able to blog on the Community. If so, what would you like to post on the blog?

We are also working on creating new areas for the Community like you mentioned. Our philosophy around creating targeted areas in the Community has largely been driven by the volume of posts on the topic and requests from Community members.  We are going to start with a technical board, which was requested here, to give members a space to bounce questions off of each other and reach out for help/support for anything that comes up in their everyday jobs. Once we have this board live, we can look into the options for more topic-specific boards. 

You have also mentioned the "Hot Topics" section on the homepage. This area pulls in topics that are actively being engaged with through comments and kudos. You did note that you can see Recent activity, which can sometimes mirror latest posts but also shows latest replies, and Solved. Solved is something we are looking to remove in the future, it is a feature that is available in the forums but we have decided not to use it, as it did not seem to make sense for the use of the Community - it is more traditional in support forums to be able to mark a reply as a resolution to one's question/issue that they posted. We have also seen a request from @Baechle here to make the default on this drop down as "Recent Activity" to see this first on the page. We are looking into this with the ability to remove the Solved section. 

If you have any further questions about the Community, please feel free to reply here or reach out to me directly through a Private Message here (to do this, you can click on my screen name, then choose the option to send Private Message) or by emailing community@isc2.org. 

Thank you, 

[rslade]

---

@SamanthaO_isc2 wrote:

*Quick housekeeping note here, I noticed that you posted feedback about a few different Community features as their own topics. In my reply to this post, we hit on all these different topics, so I am going to reply to all questions here and merge them together to avoid sending multiple notifications for each individual reply.*

 

---

Interesting.

Content management strikes again.  I had, in fact, originally created a single post that contained all three of the posts that I made (entitled, simply, '"Community" interface').  Not wanting to confuse topics or people (Eric seems to dislike posts that contain multiple issues), I deliberately separated out the three distinct factors, and created three posts.  It seems I needn't have bothered ...

[rslade]

---

@SamanthaO_isc2 wrote:
I am curious if you would like to be able to blog on the Community. If so, what would you like to post on the blog?

---

Well, I've done it before.  So that gave me pause.  At that time, I ran afoul of the blog guidelines, so I went back and checked your "community" guidelines.

Which was a bit of a lark.  Since the "Short and Concise Content Length" portion seems to justify what I did in breaking up the "interface" topic.  Also, it's the opposite to what got me into trouble in the previous blog, where I was thrown out for being too terse.

At any rate, sure, nothing in the guidelines gives me any trouble, so, yes, I'd like to blog.

What would I like to post on the blog?  Well, this being ISC2, I'd probably want to talk about, oh, I don't know, maybe information security.  Issues to do with that.  Possibly relating to certification, but also maybe to do with specific areas in individual domains.  Possibly things to do with ISC2 itself, like the fact that the new CPE portal (the place you enter your CPEs so they don't pull your cert) doesn't seem to have approved any CPEs in the past two weeks or more, or the fact that just about every page you pull up on the ISC2 Website tells you that they have a new privacy policy regardless of how many times you hit that (badwordsbadwordsbadwords) button.

(Deep breaths, Rob.  Deep breaths.)

Maybe new technologies.  Maybe old technologies being resold under a new name.  Maybe social implications of things that are being done under the name of information security.

Would you like prior notice and final approval?

[rslade]

If you'd like a specific example, this morning I found an article describing a proposed experiment that may give us some greater detail on quantum superposition, the aspect that (might) make quantum computers possible.

Since I've been studying the security implications, or implications for security, of quantum computers for over a decade, I'm intrigued.  It may tell us things about the possibilities for quantum computing, particularly in regard to reliability.  It may tell us that quantum computers are farther away (or possibly closer) than we think.

(The experiment itself seems to rely on the "reversibility" of quantum operations, and may mean that we can not only get answers out of a quantum computer instantly, but actually before the program is run.)

(When dealing with quantum mechanics, things get weird real fast.)

So that's one thought.

(Please please please do not confuse quantum computers and possible cracking of encryption with quantum cryptography, which actually is not cryptography.)