Unleashing Norwood's Potential
I’d like to take a moment … okay maybe more than a few moments … to talk about: Tech. And why it specifically matters to you as a Norwood resident while you’re thinking about Norwood’s future. You see, I was on the Tom Cummings Show one time for a debate, and during the show he asked us to talk about topics that we candidates think are important. So I mentioned the topic of municipal cyber security. And Tom raised an excellent point in response to me. He was not even being unkind, he said very sincerely “none of us know what you’re talking about when you bring up these things”.
In today’s blog post, I intend to help you see why it matters for residents and their elected officials to work together to be a Cyber Aware community. I am going to take you dear reader on another journey into the depths of technology, just like I did with the energy grid, so that you can feel more confident about understanding how these things work. I’m going to lay out a ton of my knowledge so that together, you and I and the rest of our dear fellow residents and public servants are going to forge an incredible legacy for Norwood.
The Elephant In The Server Room
Let me take a guess at what you’re typically shown when people start talking to you about cyber security threats. Probably something like a dark figure in a hoodie lurking in a seedy basement, clacking away on a computer keyboard “hacking” into people’s accounts to do nefarious fraud. Like this picture right?
This is every cyber security training video stock image ever
But what if I told you that these days, it can look more like this:
“Just another day doing cyber crimes”
Wait, that second picture is just someone doing mundane things in the bathroom, right? How could that person be doing cyber crime? What if I told you that these days, that’s exactly what it can look like. The threat landscape online is so much different than it was when people were first getting online. It’s no longer hours of personally sitting in a lair in a hoodie at the keyboard (if it ever was really). As I’ve been out campaigning, what I’m learning is that not a lot of voters or well meaning public servants even know what the risks are or what all of the components involved can be. So the only way to fix that? Start talking about it together.
Tech has come a long way since this kind of computing power
Another common reaction I get is “oh we pay people to deal with these problems, it’s fine, don’t worry about it”. But that’s kind of an odd attitude to have around municipal cyber security. We’re doing our technical experts in town a huge disservice by seeing it that way, making their work way more stressful and difficult without even meaning to.
I want to be very very clear about something that’s a little hard to get across in sound bites and interviews, and I’ll spell it out here:
I believe that we DO have very very skilled technical experts working for the town...
I can’t stress this enough.
It’s counter intuitive of me to say that, right? After all, I’m out here banging this drum on cyber security in town, and literally said during the debate “there’s a deficit of this knowledge in the municipal sector” and yet I say I believe in our tech staff/vendors. How can both of those things hold true?
Let me go further:
I believe that we DO have very very skilled technical experts working for the town …
… and I don’t think we’re letting them express their full potential
The Weight We Don’t Help To Carry
Here, let me try and explain this by using our imaginations … I want you to try and picture what life would be like if say the Fire Department had to be the sole lone experts for ALL things fire related ENTIRELY, and there was no “common knowledge” among residents or other departments and committees in town about fire. And every time the Fire Department needed to raise a fire safety issue or present a proposal to make a change that made the town safer, instead of discussion — or even disagreement — people just gave them blank stares and said “well I don’t know, that’s why we pay you to deal with it”.
Just imagine it,
None of us issuing or reading public service announcements around fire safety
Nobody reporting a fire they spotted in a building
None of us using smoke detectors
No volunteers stepping up
No one writing bylaws or other regulations to improve fire safety
No one resharing important alerts
No one taking basic first aid classes
No one even thanking them for putting out the fires
We don’t think about how we’re each interwoven with our fire fighters because it’s a service that is just kind of part of the fabric of being in a community. Dealing with fires is a profession that goes back thousands of years, and it’s a danger everyone can see easily.
The Ctesbius water pump, circa 200 BCE
Imagine if none of us were thinking at all about fire, no one except for the fire fighters themselves. How much worse would fires be? How much harder would a fire fighter’s job be? How much more property and life lost would there be? A lot.
And that’s kind of how we treat our tech experts.
When I say we have a deficit of this knowledge in the municipal space, what I mean is that we have a deficit of people beyond the direct tech employees, consultants, and immediate managers thinking about these matters in municipalities. If you’re not literally personally serving in InfoSec, an IT team, or cyber crimes lab, it tends not to be on your mind. We citizens sort of foist ALL of the responsibility and thoughts about tech safety onto our tech experts, despite us constantly increasing the presence and usage of technology in our communities, homes, and businesses. We’re like people adding fire to more and more places, but never bothering to learn much about fire safety, and not engaging with the fire fighters who are working so hard to reduce fire hazards.
Now why is that a problem? Well here’s some of the consequences of that at the municipal level:
… it’s harder to raise (and get approval for) important cyber security related proposals to town meeting or to approving Boards. Those asks aren’t taken with the same reverence or scrutiny as the topics that have more “common knowledge” among approving Boards and Managers.
… it’s harder to prevent, spot, or solve tech safety issues because hardly anyone but the tech team is able to help be on the look out for them.
… it’s harder to find volunteers to help out when needed if awareness in the community is already low.
… it’s harder to source talent to fill tech roles when someone has to retire or leave a position.
… it’s harder to get constructive feedback from residents on changes or proposed improvements.
Everything about that safety role just gets harder. Like being a fire fighter surrounded by raging fires, and people only vaguely know what fire even is, and aren’t interested in how to proactively be a little more safe around it. They just say “well, we pay you to deal with it”.
Worse yet, it also directly impacts the dynamics of how they work when they don’t get good engagement from the people they serve and report to. They brainstorm less often about new or more cost effective ways of doing things, because a wall of apathy in response to them in the past has worn them down. They don’t advocate for their discipline’s needs as much, because they don’t have anyone outside their team to help advocate with them on proposals. They don’t stay as current with the latest trends in their field, because there’s no one actively pushing to achieve more or noticing and praising how on top of things they are. Through no fault of their own, they stagnate, and that’s bad for everyone.
Because we are constantly adding technology to more and more aspects of our lives, that means that we each have a responsibility to engage and learn about this topic. We can’t rest ALL of the civic duty of technology in our communities on our tech experts alone. It’s time for each of us to follow Aaron Guild’s example, pausing from our day to day living, and taking up the call to defend our communities. Only in our cases, it’s by becoming more cyber literate.
An Invisible Barrier
One of the first direct ways that we can do that is by electing people to our key Boards and Committees in town who have skills in these areas and have a motivation to help increase tech safety awareness in town. Those who are eager to collaborate and increase community awareness around tech. I’m one of those people. And I’ve seen first hand how it makes a difference in those departments.
Let me give you just two specific times I’ve encountered this phenomenon in the public sector as a pro bono lobbyist . . .
When I was representing Norwood at the Statehouse for the Citizen Legislative Seminar (it’s basically a “Senator For A Day” program if you haven’t heard of it), one of the panels they had was bringing the Statehouse tech team in to speak with us. And when I started to ask them questions, based on my professional background knowledge, their eyes lit up and they got really excited to start talking about some of the projects they were trying to add to the MyLegislature site, such as advancing the gamification features. They then started asking us questions about what we thought of their ideas.
A second example is the time I was working on a study of Municipal Energy and engaging with the Light Department the last several years. Each time that I’ve met with a member of the Light staff or management, they start by putting their toe in the water in a conversation talking about a particular technical topic. When I and my committee members are able to engage with them on it, they just perk up immediately. Like you can literally see it in their eyes “finally another person who understands what I do, that I can talk with about it, and who isn’t my immediate co-worker!!!” Like our metaphorical fire fighter meeting a resident who had taken some fire safety classes and cares about and grasps what the fire fighter has to say about fire safety.
And shortly after these kinds of encounters, I see them start implementing the stuff that they were excited to brainstorm about. That type of engagement gives them someone outside their own work group who can provide solid feedback about ideas they were kicking around. It drives innovation, cost savings, and improvements. Notice how after I started crowing about cyber security, the Town police’s social media started crafting PSAs about how their cyber crime lab works? When our technical experts in town feel like there are people who notice what they’re up to, are challenging them to achieve more, that tends to really energize them.
Sometimes that energy might be “Oh yeah??? Look at what we do!” And you know what? GREAT! If me being vocal about cyber security causes the technical experts of the town to start engaging with residents about cyber awareness, that is 100% my goal and I would be thrilled. Because cyber awareness isn’t something residents can accomplish on their own. They need those of us in public service to help.
We have to help residents learn about the artificial world that’s all around them, because they may never have had a guide to show them before
The Duty of Digital Public Service
We often take for granted that everyone has differing levels of direct exposure to technology and technology safety material. While some of us are busy rolling our eyes at the latest mandatory security training in our office place, there are plenty of people who are never in a situation or job role where they will ever receive that level of training. There are many people who may not have had to use any technical devices before the moment that they’re trying to interface with some digitized aspect of our town services.
We need to take that variance in life experience seriously (and reverently). We can’t be frustrated by, or dismissive of, residents who have lower cyber awareness or who struggle with digital services. For any one of them, this could be their very first engagement with technology. Their very first experience being harmed by cyber crime. Their only time that they had to try and navigate a digital tool.
I liken it to flying on an airplane. Some of us have had to travel on a plane for business or other reasons repeatedly, and we have that safety speech the flight crew gives practically memorized. But I guarantee you that on each and every one of those flights, it was more than a few someone’s first time being on an airplane and hearing those safety instructions.
We have a lot of local, state, and federal level Public Service Announcements and training opportunities about hazards or ways to keep safe in daily life. Tips about home health hazards, first aid trainings, storm preparedness, and more. But have you ever paused to try and count how many of them are related to online safety? Spend a few days keeping track if you’ve never tried this thought exercise before, and what you’ll tend to find is that it’s very seldom at all. But we should absolutely be creating these types of materials for the public if we want to decrease the overhead that comes from reacting to digital threats they’ve stumbled into.
Additionally, if we want residents to utilize digital services, particularly those that will save the town money by reducing physical overhead, then it is our absolute duty to provide them with effective outreach and educational materials to onboard them. We also must help to create an atmosphere of trust in our town digital services, so that residents feel confident that it’s safe and easy to use them. If we don’t, then we risk diverting residents into more costly touch points because we couldn’t sufficiently get them to engage with our virtual ones. It’s not enough for us to tell a resident “don’t worry about it”. Imagine telling them that for any other town service?
“Trust me, we’ve got Public Works, don’t worry about it.”
”Trust me, we’ve got Police, don’t worry about it.”
”Trust me, we’ve got Town Clerks, don’t worry about it.”
In no other area of public service in town do we ask residents to just blindly trust and to “not worry about it”. Almost all of our other town services have a variety of touch points with residents. They have regular highly visible reporting to the Selectmen and Town Meeting. They have PSAs and appear as guest speakers on NCM. They host public forums and workshops. They do outreach at Norwood Day or at Norwood 101. They do interviews with local press. Our DPW, our First Responders, our Board of Health, and so many other teams are highly visible in our community telling us about their work, giving us tips on what to do (and not do), and maintaining a “common knowledge” among residents in each of their respective disciplines.
I would love to see our technology experts engaging in these same ways. We have really smart capable staff who can help residents in multiple areas! They’d be able to help residents to be more safe and aware of the dangers lurking online. They’d be able to increase adoption of some of our important digital services. They’d even get better bug reporting and repro steps after the launch of new tools. There are so many benefits to having direct community engagement. That’s what I’m hoping to encourage as a Selectman. I want our technical experts to be able to engage with residents.
This is a good place for me to pause for the night. In part 2 I’ll walk you through what I’ve been doing with the Norwood Anti-Scam Task Force! We’ll talk about some of the many challenges posed to municipalities and residents in our ever advancing world. Sometimes it can be hard to picture what’s going because it’s all happening in a virtual space, but that doesn’t make it less imperative for us to be active and informed citizens. We’ll also talk about my efforts to de-stigmatize the experience of getting scammed. Stay tuned for part 2!