To help raise the information security and privacy awareness of all personnel, I use pre-teen and teen writers to write a column within my quarterly information security and privacy awareness publication, Protecting Information.

I am once more looking for pre-teen/teen writers!

In late 2007 I launched my latest information security and privacy publication; Protecting Information.

This is a quarterly information security and privacy awareness multi-media news source to communicate to all levels of all personnel within all organizations. I'm writing the articles in such a way to point out how the topic of the quarter relates not only to the business, but also to the employee, personally, as well as to their friends and family outside of work. You can see more about it here.

My goal in creating this quarterly multi-media news source is to create an awareness communication that truly does speak to ALL personnel at ALL levels of an organization, using terminology understandable by non-security folks, and incorporating my experience and background in education to use the proven concepts that must be utilized to effectively communicate to all three types of learners:

* Visual (this is typically the only group most current awareness products speak to)

* Audio (those who learn best by listening to information)

* Kinesthetic (hands-on learners; those who need to do activities to learn)

By including a teen/pre-teen writer in each issue I will accomplish a couple of things:

* Help personnel see how the topic impacts not only them, but their own family members. This will help them to better understand their responsibilities for the security and/or privacy topic, and also help them to take ownership for their actions related to the topic.

* Start helping teens and children to take an active interest in information security and privacy issues. I know my own sons have grown up with me doing my work in my home office, often discussing security and privacy issues with them, and they now, at 10 years old and 8 years old, have an amazingly high interest in, as well as insight into, a wide range of information security and privacy issues.

I would be so happy to get youth interested in learning more about security and privacy issues, and get them more active in talking about the issues with their friends and family. If I can plant the seed of interest in just a few teens, and then in turn they get their friends interested, pretty soon our future information security and privacy leaders will have a strong foundation of knowledge in this topic. This could lead them to doing such things as improving the security of their home networks, improving the security of their school networks, possibly even improving the security of their parents' employers or home-owned businesses.

You know the saying, "It takes a village to raise a child"?

Well, similarly I believe in these high-tech times that it takes the entire family to protect your private information.

For information security initiatives to be effective, awareness communications must be ongoing and delivered in a wide variety of ways. I'm providing this publication as another way to communicate awareness messages along with all the many other ways that can be used; I have compiled a list of at least 200 information security and privacy awareness communications methods and activities.

I am happy to have had two young writers (a 14-year-old girl and a 16-year-old boy) who have already contributed to my first two issues (the first issue was about social networking sites, and the second issue was about social engineering), and I really appreciate that they are both eager to write for me again! However, I'd like to have a little larger variety of writers to contribute to my publication. My goal is to get at least four different youth that I can rotate for different quarterly issues.

So now I am looking for another youth writer for an article, in the 400 - 600 (possibly stretching to 800 if the content is substantial) word length range, on the topic of information disposal (in all or any forms, such as paper, eletronic storage, and so on). The youth writer will need to have the first draft completed and to me by February 25, and then any edits (based upon my feedback to him/her) completed by March 10.

The youth writer will get paid well for an article of this length for someone of his or her age and experience. The writer I am looking for needs to be dependable, responsive to the messages I send, not afraid to ask me questions if she or he has any while writing, and able to write reasonably well; I'll provide feedback to help him or her refine writing skills. Writing this published article will also be good for the young writer to put on his or her resume, and she or he can share a copy of the final version of the publication with his or her teachers and school.

If you know of a young writer who would be interested in doing this article, please contact me directly at rebeccaherold@rebeccaherold.com and I can provide more information.

And, if any of you have feedback about my new publication, let me know! I want to make sure that I am creating something that will truly be valuable to information security, privacy and compliance practitioners and help them to improve security not only within their organizations, but also within the homes of their personnel.