It's been no secret that I think the lack of soft skills in the security space is one of our biggest problems. While usually I usually only write all about the world's problems and how to fix them here, during RSA I'm going to take a somewhat different approach.
I'm giving a talk on Friday titled Why Won't Anyone Listen to Us?
I'm going to talk about how a security person can talk to a normal person without turning them against us. We're a group that doesn't like talking to anyone, even each other. We need to start talking to people. I'm not saying we should stand around and accept abuse, I am saying the world wants help with security. We're not really in a place to give it because we don't like people. But they need our help, most of them know it even!
We've all had countless interactions where we give someone good, real advice, and they just completely ignore us. It's infuriating sometimes. Part of the problem is we're not talking to people, we're throwing verbal information at them, and they ignore it. They listen to Oprah, if she told them about two factor auth everyone would be using it by the end of the week!
That's just it, they listen to Oprah. They're going to listen to anyone who talks to them in a way they understand. If it's not us, it will be someone else, probably someone we don't want talking about security.
I can't teach you to like people (there are limits to my abilities), but I can help teach you how to talk to them. And of course a talk like this will need to have plenty of fun sprinkled in. How to talk to someone while being very important, can also be an extremely boring topic.
I touched on some of this during my Devconf.cz talk.
Red Hat is also putting on a Breakfast on Wednesday morning. I'm going to keynote it (I'll keep it short and sweet for those of you attending, there's nothing worse than a speaker at 8am who talks too much).
A coworker, Richard Morrell, is running a podcast from RSA called Locked Down. Be sure to give it a listen. I may even be able to convince him to let me on his show.
I have no doubt the RSA conference will be a great time. If you're there come find me, Red Hat has a booth, North Expo #N3038. Come say hi, or not if you don't like talking to people ;)
There or not, feel free to start a conversation on Twitter. I'm @joshbressers