Develop/Install the software

Once you have officially registered your WARP, you will need to develop, install and/or configure the necessary software. In reality, you will probably have done much of the planning phase already. You will need

• the filtered warnings service

• a closed, secure, anonymous interactive area for the advice service

• a methodology for receiving and possibly posting incident reports to the WARP site.

Filtered Warnings Service

Only after registering an official WARP can you buy the FWA software. You are not required to use the FWA.

The FWA can be purchased and downloaded from a third party provider who can also provide optional support for the system: http://www.aviusexperience.com/fwamarketing.php.

This is not the place to discuss how to install and use the FWA software - there are several documents in the WARP Toolbox and on the Avius Experience site that will do this.

However, everything you need to deliver the filtered warnings service is available from the FWA software. The alternative is to develop your own. The simplest concept would be to use mailing lists for each different application. Thus, a Member with an interest in XP, MS Office, and Firefox (but not Internet Explorer) would have to be able to subscribe to a separate mailing list for each application. It is just about feasible to do this within education since schools software is likely to focus around a fairly small set of fairly mainstream applications. However, if this is the route you choose, you must be very aware of the amount of development effort that will be required, and be confident that you have those resources.

Peer-to-peer connection and information sharing with other WARPs is built into the FWA. If you decide not to use the FWA, you will need to develop your own peer-to-peer capabilities. The formats for information sharing use XML and are specified in the WARP Toolbox.

Advice Brokering Service

The advice brokering service should allow Members to seek advice on specific problems from other Members. It therefore needs to be interactive. Member A should be able to post a query, and Members B, C and D should be able to post a reply (all anonymously where desired). This is effectively a standard blog, where Member A posts an article, and Members B, C and D post comments to that article. If you don't already have such interactive capabilities on your site, then open source (free) blog software can provide the solution.

WordPress is one such application. It is sufficiently powerful to provide all that you will require, while still offering a high degree of configurability. You can set it to allow Members to write and comment direct, or to require moderation. It also includes an effective spam filter; and you can design it to appear to be an integral part of the overall site.

Reporting Point

The WARP concept requires that you provide a Reporting Point where Members can report security incidents. How you do this is up to you. You could use the same methodology as you use for the Advice Brokering area, or you could provide static HTML pages that you post yourself.

In the former, you can again choose between letting Members post direct, or via yourself as Moderator.

In the latter, you receive incident reports from your Members (phone or email), sanitize them, and publish them on the site.

The important point is that you encourage the reporting of incidents by your Members, and you then make details of those incidents available to everyone.

It becomes a local early warning system: forewarned is forearmed.

In the long term, it is envisaged that sharing incident reports among all the different WARPs will become a valuable part of the WARP network. To this end, a standard reporting form is available from the WARP Toolbox in the Trusted sharing section.

Use of this form is not obligatory - for the moment, it is only important that you encourage reporting, and that you make details of reported incidents available to other Members.

Now that you have installed your software capability, you need to understand the best places to get your information. This is described in establish sources.

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