[OWASP-Chapters] Summary of the 1st Israeli OWASP chapter meeting

[Jeff Williams]

Congratulations!  Great questions...

1. Chapters can (and are) developing presentations, working on OWASP 
projects, and doing local training events.  I think it's fine to use the 
mailing lists for local discussion "among friends" -- although I do 
encourage posting to webappsec.  What do you mean by web-site?  Something 
other than the portal page?

2. Some of the chapters are running in a sort of dual mode.  On the one 
hand, they have technical discussions for OWASP contributors and webappsec 
experts.  On the other, they have public awareness and community kinds of 
discussions for industry and the public.  Some are trying to combine these 
into two 'tracks' within the meeting, and others are trying to schedule 
separate meetings with the different purposes.

--Jeff

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Ofer Shezaf
To: owasp-chapters at lists.sourceforge.net
Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2005 8:30 AM
Subject: [OWASP-Chapters] Summary of the 1st Israeli OWASP chapter meeting


Hi All,

Yesterday we had the 1st meeting of the Israeli chapter. The meeting was 
very successful with over 50 people attending, and the feedback was that the 
meeting was great and people enjoyed the presentations (as well the pizzas). 
Since Israel seems to be packed with vendors developing application security 
solutions, we had in the audience top technology guys from companies such as 
Checkpoint, BMC, RADware,F5, Imperva and of course Breach Security who 
hosted the event (this still left a lot of room for end user and consulting 
companies though.)

Some of the issues that came to my mind following the event are:

1. Activities - apart from a periodical meeting, what else a chapter should 
do? At least here in Israel translating things to Hebrew does not seem very 
important (in our trade everybody speaks English). So what else?
Mailing list - should the local mailing list be used for professional 
discussion or managing activities only, shouldn't professional discussion be 
directed at the webasppsec mailing list?
Web site - is there a room for a local OWASP chapter web site?
Other?

2. Level of presentations - we had in the room the people who wrote some of 
the most technical white papers in our professional field, as well as people 
who do general info-sec at organizations. It is pretty difficult to address 
both audiences. Any ideas?

~ Ofer

Ofer Shezaf
OWASP Israel Chair
http://www.owasp.org/local/israel.html

CTO, Breach Security
Phone (US): +1 (760) 268.1924 ext. 702
Phone (Israel): +972 (9) 956.0036 ext.212
Cell: +972 (54) 443.1119
ofers at breach.com
http://www.breach.com