Good day to you,

I was asked by Ms. Zandra Myers, project coordinator of the Ready Rockaway organization, if I could join in helping to build out this new organization/initiative here in my hometown of Far Rockaway. As a community leader I was very enthused by this opportunity as I also work with Ms. Myers on the Far Rockaway Community Coalition Executive’s Team and have found her to be quite an intriguing lady with a serious desire to give something of value back to her community here. I saw this to be a very good synergy for the two organizations as they are both focused on the community and being involved in different ways. Bringing the two together for the greater good of the community is the ultimate goal. So, I accepted the offer and have started working on building out the technology aspects of the organization as you will see below.

This is how I envisioned our technology professionals working within their communities to help build on initiatives like these and get something valuable and useful going there. Our yearly community outreach programs approached this from a technology point of view with the hope that organizations within the community would find value in having a specialist working within their midst to help them get over some of the issues they may have in building out their project plans and initiatives. This is just another way that TITSSN integrates into the process of community involvement and bringing the added values. I hope that we will continue to see more of these kinds of initiatives for our global network and i’d like to hear of them and where they are being done.

Far Rockaway is a beach front community surrounded by the sea and across from the JFK airport. It is a beautiful place to sit back and watch the sunset or just gaze at the massive existence of the airport across the water day or night. A disaster can occur from any angle here and so this is a much needed initiative to save lives. I believe in being proactive than reactive and so here we go in the undertaking of this disaster/emergency preparedness initiative. Since this is what I do on a day to day basis, it pretty much marries into my scheme of things but adding the more physical side outside of IT to these issues. As a person who has developed and assisted in disaster recovery and planning for general businesses and organizations, I can use that knowledge to help build this community initiative to a higher level.

Here’s a little about the organization and my role.

The Ready Rockaway Disaster/Emergency Preparedness organization was formed to focus on the planning and development of an emergency response system for the Rockaway’s NY in the event of a disaster (natural or unnatural). The organization will create the needed training and development and disaster planning needed in the Far Rockaway community in an effort to scale out the needed sense of awareness to the possibility of a disaster and its effects.

As with any such initiative, the support and input of the community is critical to its success and so we call on our community to join us as we build on this.

We have made an extra effort to follow the growing communication trends of technology today and so we have a good presence on the social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace and others to come.

My role is to use my technology background and expertise to create a converged network aggregating the needed education, awareness, alerting, monitoring and management of the technology and web infrastructure needed to make this effective. I will create the infrastructure to host this virtually and technologically while also training the team and community members on the technology behind the operations and how they will help to make this effort more user friendly and successful. I will be a liaison for the organization to address the strategic partnering and affiliations with outside technology organizations and companies in order for us to have the needed resources available to us.

Our web infrastructure is up and the info’s are:

Our website is http://readyrockaway.org.
Our Blogs http://readyrockaway.org/blogs
Our Forum http://readyrockaway.org/forum
Follow us on Twitter here http://twitter.com/ReadyRockaway
On Facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=58417332634
LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/e/vgh/1853669/
MySpace http://groups.myspace.com/readyrockaway

And more to come.

Thank you and have a great day,

~Brett A. Scudder~
The IT Security Attaché

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