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Reposted from Tech Republic
Smart security teams have updated incident response plans in place before a security breach happens.
Companies that don't take the time to develop a security incident response plan pay a high price when the inevitable breach happens.
According to IBM, organizations with incident response teams and plans spend about $1.2 million less on data breaches than companies without preparations in place.
However, in IBM's recent report "The 2020 Cyber Resilient Organization Study," the company found that about 51% of companies have only an informal response plan that is often applied inconsistently.
Building an incident response plan and testing it is an investment of time and effort that will reduce stress and costs.
IBM security experts recommend that security teams take time to understand the top threats in their industries and prepare detailed response plans to a specific kind of attack.
Establishing a clear communication strategy is a must for any incident response policy. Daniel Eliot, director of education and strategic initiatives at the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), said clear and comprehensive communication should be a top priority during all security breaches. "Without a clearly articulated chain of command and both an internal and external communications strategy that brings all the right people to the table, the quality of the response gets diminished," he said.
Jerry Ray, chief operations officer at SecureAge, said incident response plans need to take into account how to allocate resources depending on the criticality of the infrastructure components affected by the breach. This could mean prioritizing immediate remediation of the attack or restoration of a mission critical server or forensic analysis of the mechanism of the attack.
"The order and allocation will be entirely dependent on the attack vector, the system(s) attacked, the data exfiltrated, the IT staff available either in-house or on contract, and the general industry or business line of the victim," he said.
Often incident response policies focus on what to do before and during a breach, but it should also include steps for what to do after an incident.
For example, Eliot said that documentation often gets neglected in the aftermath of a breach/.
"Document the lessons learned, and then develop and implement a strategy to reinforce these learnings across the enterprise," he said. "If you don't learn from your mistakes, you're bound to repeat them."
Eliot said companies recovering from a security breach should answer these questions:
Ray added that another important follow-up task is to do a total review of all the tools, policies, and settings within the system that suffered the breach.
"Typically, the single point of failure is somehow revisited and shored up or patched as if that was the only weakness," he said. "In reality, the entire security blanket needs to be unwoven, as the ineffective components may have led to or created that point of vulnerability, which on its own may not have been vulnerable."
Eliot also recommended that IT teams loop in legal counsel after an attack to understand any applicable reporting and notification responsibilities under national and international data breach laws.
TechRepublic Premium's Incident response policy will help your company set a plan for immediate action as well as develop follow-up tasks after a security breach. The policy includes guidance on assembling a response team and the responsibilities of every person on that team.
This Incident response policy gives you a comprehensive start on a plan and allows you to customize it to fit your company's particular needs.
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Reposted from The New York Times
On any given day, somewhere in the United States, someone is going to wake up, leave the house and get in a huge argument with a stranger about wearing masks.
Grocery store managers are training staff on how to handle screaming customers. Fistfights are breaking out at convenience stores. Some restaurants even say they’d rather close than face the wrath of various Americans who believe that masks, which help prevent the spread of coronavirus, impinge on their freedom.
Joe Rogers, 47, a resident of Dallas, said that just last week, he had gotten in a physical fight over masks.
In line at a Mini-Mart, he spotted a customer behind him not wearing a mask, he said, and he shook his head. The man asked why Mr. Rogers had been looking at him and Mr. Rogers, again, shook his head.
“I wear a full face guard, the mask that they use when they spray pesticides,” he said. “He reached for my mask and tried to pull it off.” Mr. Rogers said his “natural instinct” came out and he put his hand up and knocked the man to the floor.
In Dallas, beginning June 19, businesses were required to ensure customers and staff wore masks. Mr. Rogers said that though he had not hit another person in “a decade or so” this was not the first altercation he’d had over masks.
“I’ve already been in several,” he said. “I’ve been in shouting matches with people at CVS. People just don’t understand it. If everyone just wore a mask, this would be over.”
Mr. Rogers’s brother, Jason Rogers, a Democratic candidate in Texas’ 57th House District, said that he was aware of the confrontation and expressed support for his brother. “This is Texas, you know,” he said. “Stand your ground.”
Masks were already a political flash point, and months of mixed messages about their usefulness have contributed to the confusion. Now, they’re also fodder for viral videos.
A surge of reported cases of coronavirus in states like California, Texas and Florida has led authorities in those states to issue new guidance on masks. Evidence suggests masks can help prevent transmission of the virus even when worn by seemingly healthy people.
Early in the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said several times that those without symptoms did not have to wear masks. On April 3, the agency shifted, saying that masks should be worn in public.
But President Trump, announcing the new guidance, said, “Somehow, I don’t see it for myself” and has continued to appear in public without a mask. On Sunday, after months of shunning a mask himself, Vice President Mike Pence urged Americans to wear them.
Orders regarding masks that carry the force of law have been left to individual states. And in states where altercations over masks have been reported, those orders have recently changed.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California ordered the mandatory wearing of masks in public on June 18. A little more than a week later, Hugo’s Tacos, a taqueria with two locations in the Los Angeles area, announced that it would close temporarily because its staff was “exhausted by the constant conflicts over guests refusing to wear masks.”
The chief executive of Hugo’s, Bill Kohne, said that it was only in the last few weeks that the encounters had become so vitriolic. His staff had been confronted with racist language, he said, and he was concerned for their safety. Recently, one of Mr. Kohne’s facility managers supervising one of the storefronts observed five confrontations over masks in a single hour.
“The one that we most viscerally remember is that a customer at the pickup window who was asked to wear a mask literally threw a cup of water through the window at the clerk,” Mr. Kohne said.
He provided The New York Times with an email from a customer that he said was representative of many customers’ attitudes.
“Why is it the responsibility of a taco stand to dictate to its customers a personal freedom of choosing to wear or not wear a mask!” it said, concluding: “Go to hell taco man. Close permanently! Do us all a favor!”
(The person who sent the email did not respond to a request for comment from The Times.)
Public fights over masks have occurred with extraordinary frequency, service workers say, and far exceed the large number of those already captured by smartphones in viral videos.
Confrontations are taking place even in states that have been more consistent in guidance about masks. Massachusetts required that residents wear masks in grocery stores starting in early May. Still, Alli Milliken, 20, who returned to her job at a grocery store chain in the state several weeks ago, has already seen a conflict. She said that recently a customer wearing a mask called out another customer who was not.
“The unmasked guy shrugged at him and was like, ‘It’s a free country. The virus isn’t real. I can do what I want,’” Ms. Milliken said. “The masked guy then says, ‘I work in a hospital. I’ll be seeing you soon, buddy.’”
Ms. Milliken said that she had not been given any training or direct instruction on de-escalating conflict between customers.
“I don’t know how to go about saying, ‘Oh you should be wearing a mask,’” she said. “I don’t know what my place is.”
The conflicts over masks have been particularly difficult for essential workers, who have been working long shifts and dealing with frazzled and frenzied customers throughout the pandemic.
Londyn Robinson, 26, a medical student in Minnesota, said that her mother, a manager at a big box store in South Florida, was now having to instruct her staff on how to defuse tense situations, along with working long shifts and sanitizing the store.
“I never in a million years would have thought that working in a grocery store would have been considered a high-risk job,” she said. “It breaks my heart.”
Ms. Robinson’s mother, who asked to be kept anonymous for fear of losing her job, said that in the last two to three weeks, fights over masks had become astonishingly frequent. It was not uncommon for the police to be called to her store three to four times a day, she said.
“We’ve had shoppers go after each other,” she said. “Pushing matches, running carts into each other, running over people’s feet, ankles.”
She said that many of the staff members she supervised were already working 12 to 14 hour days and had been doing so since March. (There were physical conflicts with shoppers then, too; Ms. Robinson’s mother said she was slapped in the back of a neck by a customer who was frustrated that the store had run out of toilet paper.)
Even offering masks to customers did not work, she said: “They’ll outright decline or they’ll show you a fraudulent card that says, ‘You can’t ask me to do this.’”
The fighting between customers creates a tension that does not dissipate once the altercation has ended, she said. She no longer feels comfortable walking to her car alone after the store closes, concerned that an aggravated customer may be waiting for her there.
“Now we go two to three employees at a time,” she said.
In Florida, where cases of the virus have been rising rapidly, the state had not issued any official rules on masks as of Tuesday morning, leaving the decision in the hands of counties, localities and small businesses. (The state’s department of health issued a public advisory on June 20 recommending masks.)
Chris McArthur runs Black and Brew coffee in Lakeland, Fla., which is in a county where Mr. Trump won 55 percent of the vote in 2016. Mr. McArthur decided on Monday to begin requiring customers to wear masks at the business’s two locations.
“We had actually been mulling it over for a couple of weeks,” he said. “We were hoping that our city commission would pass an ordinance that would require it locally. Our fear was that if we went out on a limb, because it wasn’t the norm, we would receive a lot of backlash from our customers.”
Still, Mr. McArthur made the decision. “We felt like if we did that, other businesses might follow our lead and our customers might appreciate the extra precautionary measures that we were taking,” he said.
He said that he hoped that conflicts would not arise. But he expects them to, and has coached staff on how to respond. If a customer becomes belligerent, he said, “We would have to call the nonemergency line and hope that the police are available to come help us out.”
Reposted from the Gothamist
The Metropolitan Museum Of Art and The New-York Historical Society both announced today that they are planning to reopen in August, making them the first major museums in New York City to announce reopening plans since the coronavirus shutdowns began.
The Met is planning to reopen on August 29th with new social distancing guidelines in place, which will be revealed closer to the reopen date.
“The safety of our staff and visitors remains our greatest concern," said Daniel H. Weiss, President and CEO of The Met. "We are eagerly awaiting our reopening as, perhaps now more than ever, the Museum can serve as a reminder of the power of the human spirit and the capacity of art to bring comfort, inspire resilience, and help us better understand each other and the world around us.”
The Met Cloisters in Washington Heights is also planning to reopen shortly after the main branch; The Met Breuer on the Upper East Side will not be reopening however, and the space will be taken over by the Frick Collection.
The Met is expected to reopen with shorter hours and fewer days per week, and all tours, talks, concerts, and events will be canceled through the rest of 2020. They hope to resume all those activities in 2021, including the Met Gala, which has been officially canceled for 2020; and they plan to have a belated celebration of the institution's 150th anniversary next year as well.
When visits do resume, the museum has a few exhibits it's planning to debut, including: Making The Met, 1870-2020, the signature exhibition of the Museum’s 150th anniversary celebration; The Roof Garden Commission: Héctor Zamora, Lattice Detour, the latest in a series of annual presentations of a site-specific work on the open-aired roof garden; and The Costume Institute’s About Time: Fashion and Duration exhibition, which was going to be the theme of this year's Met Gala, is scheduled to open on October 29th, 2020.
The Met, which officially closed on March 13th, has projected at least a $100 million loss in revenue because of the pandemic and the shutdown (and that figure was based on estimates that the museum would be able to reopen in July). As a result, it has laid off 81 staff members so far.
Before COVID-19, The Met had previously closed for two days on only two occasions: after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy.
The New-York Historical Society is planning to reopen in stages starting August 14th, pending approval from officials. They will start with a special free outdoor exhibition called Hope Wanted: New York City Under Quarantine, which documents the experiences of New Yorkers during the height of the pandemic.
Curated by writer Kevin Powell and photographer Kay Hickman, the exhibit features more than 50 photographs taken by Hickman along with 12 audio interviews with the photographs’ subjects conducted by Powell and his team between April 8th and 9th. It will take place outdoors in New-York Historical’s rear courtyard; admission will be free, but access will be limited and face coverings will be required for entry, with social distancing enforced through timed-entry tickets and on-site safety measures.
Then on September 11th, the museum plans to reopen indoors with safety protocols for visitors and staff. “We are eager to welcome visitors back to the New-York Historical Society,” said Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society. “While so much has changed over the past several months, our mission of ‘Making History Matter’ remains vital, now more than ever before.”
More details about the reopening protocols will be announced soon. The museum, which also closed to the public on March 13th, has been collecting items from the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests in the city in recent months.
Reposted from the American Alliance of Museums (AAM)
In the midst of a pandemic that has brought an incredible amount of pain and suffering to so many of us, I know there’s a lot on your plate as a leader, and you are being pulled in multiple directions. However, it is critical that you realize we are witnessing, in real time, the tale of two Americas.
While every one of us is trying to stay safe and healthy, we’ve seen the disproportionate toll that COVID-19 has taken on communities of color, and specifically on the Black community. This has been coupled with a string of recent racist acts of violence, including murder, against Black people in the United States at the hands of white people and police. Ahmaud Arbery was hunted down, shot, and killed in Georgia; Breonna Taylor was shot in her bed in Kentucky; Christian Cooper was harassed in Central Park; and George Floyd was violently murdered by the force of a policeman while screaming that he could not breathe. In just the last few days, two names have been added to this list: Tony McDade and David McAtee. And these are only the incidents of harassment and death that have made the news. We know there are countless other incidents against people of color in this country daily that go unpublicized.
As we bear witness to protests across the country in the name of justice, equity, and our shared humanity, every person and organization must decide how to respond. Those of us with experience in the DEAI space often find ourselves working with leaders and organizations that describe themselves as committed to equity and inclusion, but regularly remain silent on timely issues that really matter. This inaction speaks volumes to how much further we have to go. It is time to truly recommit to DEAI and do better. Here are some steps you can take, as a museum leader, to do so.
Just as you might check in with a colleague after a family member passed, check in with people of color in your museum about how they’re doing. For many of us, the murder of any unarmed person of color can feel like it was our own, because we know that it could have just as easily been us, a brother, a father, a mother, a sister, or a friend. Consider this statistic: Black men have a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police. That is shattering. For the Black community, every time an unarmed Black person is killed, it adds to a collective trauma that feels like watching yourself murdered repetitively on national television. You may not understand this phenomenon, but you need to accept it as valid and true.
I’ve heard from numerous people of color who work in museums and nonprofits with a stated commitment to centering equity and unlearning white supremacy culture, yet hear nothing from leadership, or even colleagues, when these tragedies occur. This is distressing. DEAI work cannot be sustained without supportive, authentic work relationships.
Acting like nothing is happening is putting your comfort over our humanity. Here are a few ways you can check in with your staff:
Beyond just checking in about how people feel, you should start a conversation about what they need. This can vary from person to person: your employees are not impacted by events in the same way. Black people are dying from the pandemic at a higher rate because of pre-existing conditions, lack of health insurance, a lack of access to proper care, and because social distancing is a privilege that people experiencing homelessness cannot afford. Now, in this devastating time, this reality is compounded with the fact that Black people are also dying because white police are harassing and killing them while jogging, bird watching, or enjoying other basic public rights.
A few days ago, I was on seven Zoom meetings, four of which included white folks and three which were attended only by people of color. The former meetings did not even mention current events, while each of the latter included check-ins to ask how we were all doing, share our thoughts and emotions, and show support for each other as best we could. The stark contrast between these meetings really shook me. I implore you: take the time to check in with your staff members of color. We are filled with pain, rage, sadness, and many combinations of these and other emotions. Checking in to learn about what we’re experiencing and what we need is not a big ask.
Like other organizations, museums often make public statements when they are being impacted by timely events, such as the current pandemic. The recent tragic murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, David McAtee, and George Floyd may be a perfect example of when a museum might consider a public statement about their commitment to equity. I understand, however, that may not be your case. As a museum leader, I know you have multiple responsibilities, multiple constituencies, and multiple points of view that you need to take into account when making decisions about public statements.
In the meantime, a good start is to make an internal statement. This statement does not have to be long, but it does need to acknowledge and address what is happening around the murder of Black people, and it needs to reaffirm your specific commitment to doing the much-needed equity work within your own museum.
Do not consider making a public statement without making an internal one first. In our experience, organizations have often released public statements about current events without addressing the issues internally with staff, leading to many staff members of color feeling oppressed within their own organizations. Your museum’s public commitment to DEAI must align with its internal one.
These are the times in which you and your museum’s commitments to DEAI will be put to test. As a museum leader, you will need to make the decisions that authentically showcase this commitment, express empathy, and honor your staff members of color’s experiences.
Reposted from The Atlantic
The debate over what should be done with controversial or offensive statues—whether they be of Edward Colston, the 17th-century British slave trader; Belgium’s King Leopold II, whose brutal reign led to the deaths of millions of Congolese; or Robert E. Lee, the Confederate army commander—largely centers on competing narratives between those who argue that getting rid of these statues is tantamount to erasing history and those who say that far from representing history, these monuments idolize the role of those they depict.
While some have suggested placing these statues in a museum or leaving them to deteriorate naturally, I propose another way: a statue of limitations, where towns and cities would hold a mass review of their monuments, say every 50 years. At that point, citizens would be tasked with deciding whether to maintain the memorials as they are, reimagine them, or remove them from the public square for good. These reviews, led by local authorities or citizens’ assemblies, would democratize the debate around these civic symbols and, perhaps most crucially, force communities to engage with the history and values they represent.
This isn’t a simple solution. For one thing, it would undoubtedly require plenty of study and deliberation, which is more than can be said for the processes that led to many of these statues being erected in the first place. “It’s not like some democratic assembly or a panel of historians decides to do these things,” Christopher Phelps, a historian and associate professor of American studies at the University of Nottingham in Britain, told me. “It’s usually the people who have great power and wealth deciding to honor the kind of past or kind of society they want.”
Democratizing the process by which statues are erected, or reconsidered, could go a long way in ensuring that today’s statues are a fair representation of this century, rather than simply a relic of the past. It would also force communities to grapple with the history attached to these monuments, which, in turn, would help dispel the notion that statues were put up as an accurate representation of that history. As Claudine van Hensbergen, an associate professor at Britain’s Northumbria University who studies public statues from the 17th and 18th centuries, told me, “Statues are not history … They are symbols.”
This isn’t to say that the individuals depicted in statues ought to be perfect. While not every historical figure is deserving of being revered in the public realm, those who are aren’t necessarily without flaws. This reality has been at the crux of the debate in Britain over whether a statue of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, which was recently defaced with graffiti during an anti-racism protest, should also be targeted for removal. Though Churchill is widely respected for his stewardship of the country and his thwarting of Nazism during the Second World War, he was also an avowed imperialist acknowledged to have espoused racist views.
Here, too, a formalized process by which communities debate and discuss the merits of a statue would help: Giving people the space to weigh the pros and cons would combat the simplistic view that historical figures are either heroes or villains. It would also provide communities with the space to discuss a number of approaches. Some could opt to install supplemental plaques to contextualize certain memorials, as was done with Confederate statues in Georgia. Others could choose to transfer the statue in question to a museum, as is planned for the statues of Colston and a Leopold II statue that was recently removed by Belgian authorities in Antwerp. Enterprising communities could even choose to reimagine statues altogether, as has been suggested by the graffiti artist Banksy, who sketched a remade Colston memorial that maintains the original statue while also commemorating the anti-racism protesters who earlier this month pulled it down into the Bristol harbor.
Logistically, of course, making any changes to, or removing, statues is more complicated. Not all statues are erected on public land, or by public authorities—the University of Oxford’s recent decision to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes, whose imperialist legacy made him the target of student protest, would, for example, require coordination with local authorities as it is the equivalent of a historic landmark. (The leader of the Oxford city council has publicly backed the statue’s removal.) “It’s a lot easier to put a statue up than it is to take one down,” van Hensbergen said.
Still, a statue of limitations would aim to do more than simply provide answers for what to do with monuments of figures whose legacies have aged poorly. The concept rests on the notion that communities should periodically come together to reconsider who gets commemorated in the public square. Though this could mean removing monuments that no longer reflect the values of a society, it could also mean adding new ones that do—including more memorials to women, who make up less than a quarter of all statues in Britain and just 10 percent of statues in the United States.
Perhaps more than anything, the debate would help remind communities what statues are for. “Good statues … should be provocative,” van Hensbergen said. “Great art is provocative. It makes us ask questions of ourselves.”
Reposted from Artnet News
The Oakland Museum of California was born in the shadow of racial division and protest. We opened our doors in 1969 amid the demonstrations to free Huey Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party, who was on trial in the wake of a violent exchange with police. His trial took place across the street from the museum, at the Alameda County Courthouse.
In this context, the museum’s founding director, Jim Holliday, attempted to form a community advisory committee amid calls to better incorporate community members into the project. He was fired for insubordination six weeks before the museum opened; other museum leadership resigned in protest of his ouster.
The commitment to equity, which is baked into our DNA, is also compelled by our location in one of the most diverse cities in the country, defined by a history of social justice and activism. Over the past decade, we have worked to live up to those values. We have diversified our board, our staff, and our audience, and have begun to measure the impact we are having on the well-being of our community beyond traditional measures of attendance or financial benchmarks, which tend to reinforce the way things have always been done.
At the same time, our external research—and, even more importantly, the internal reckoning we’ve confronted in recent weeks—have revealed how much further we have to go. I present some of the steps that we’ve taken with humility, acknowledging that we have many more steps to take collectively as a field and within our own organization as we work toward justice.
We know, especially now, that a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and access begins at home. Over the past several years, we have worked to increase the diversity of our staff and board, to develop tools for greater intercultural understanding, and to place engagement with our community at the core of our work. This involves not only setting benchmarks, but also making sure we are measuring the right things.
On the board level, we set a specific goal for people of color to comprise 40 percent of the members; we met that goal in 2016 and have sustained it since. Seven years ago, we established a community engagement committee to help design internal training specifically for trustees related to equity and inclusion and to champion our work with community partners. We are now one of 50 museums across the country participating in the American Alliance of Museums’ Facing Change initiative to increase board diversity, a two-year effort that involves training, the compilation of a diversity and equity plan, and the recruitment of at least two new trustees of color.
On the staff side, we restructured our entire organization in 2011 to place the visitor at the center and to dismantle some of the silos that typically exist in museums. We created new positions to serve as visitor advocates and established an evaluation department so that we could hold ourselves accountable. While introducing these functions into a museum may not seem significant, incorporating the perspective of visitors and community members into discussions about planning exhibitions and evaluating success has been transformational. We now launch most major projects with a convening that includes community members with lived experience in the topic to help us shape the content. And every major exhibition concludes with a full debriefing led by our head of evaluation so that team members can hear directly about visitors’ experiences.
We’ve also created new teams and initiatives to cultivate leadership at every level of the organization, including a paid internship program. Beginning in 2013, we put in place new processes for recruiting, hiring, and compensation designed to reduce bias and promote equity. For example, we created new job description templates for positions to eliminate barriers for hire, including education level, and developed a compensation structure that does not factor in degrees or tenure. We also implemented a rigorous hiring process that includes panel interviews for all staff openings, which aims to counterbalance individual biases.
A commitment to equity must also extend beyond the staff. Last year, we began shifting our approach to investing in order to incorporate sustainable and responsible practices that align with our social impact priorities. While we have not yet formalized a new investment policy or divested in specific sectors, we have engaged the staff and board in discussions to consider how all our investments, including vendor relationships, support our mission. Our current context will surely influence these discussions.
The journey to make equity and inclusion a central aspect of every person’s job—as well as a fundamental responsibility of governance—has taken years and significant commitment from every level of the organization. It’s also taken investment. This has sometimes required us to make difficult choices—such as the decision to focus less on technology and digital engagement in recent years. These are choices that, as with everything right now, we’re having to revisit as the museum remains closed to the public. And yet our sustained focus on equity positions us to move forward now with even deeper work around anti-racism.
This commitment is inextricably linked to our relationship to our community—ties that have been strong since the beginning, as the museum served as a department of the city of Oakland for most of its history. Since the 1970s, we have worked with advisory councils and volunteer groups to connect the museum to the particular needs of Oakland’s diverse communities. Two of our active committees today include our Dia de los Muertos Committee, which leads an annual community celebration now in its 26th year, and the Native Advisory Council, which provides expertise and guidance on issues related to Native collections, programming, and cultural practices.
Over the past few years, we have doubled down on this commitment. We have collaborated with community members in co-creating programming with deep local resonance, such as All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50, RESPECT: Hip-Hop Style and Wisdom, and Queer California: Untold Stories. Our Friday Nights at OMCA, a weekly festival of music, dance, food, and art-making, has been a game-changer for our institution, attracting some 200,000 people annually. Together, these programs have made OMCA much more than a museum. We are now seen as an indispensable community resource and a gathering place for all of Oakland and the East Bay region.
We’ve been able to measure our success because of the investment we’ve made in evaluation. Our highly local audience (90 percent from a 50-mile radius) is more diverse culturally (56 percent people of color in 2019 compared with 46 percent in 2017) and economically (58 percent are low and middle income) as well as younger (62 percent under 45 in 2019 versus 58 percent in 2017), with many more families attending with young children. These shifts make our audience a closer reflection of the local population of Alameda County, which comprises 60 percent people of color.
Over the past several years, we’ve also worked to identify our social impact—how successful we have been in building greater trust, understanding, and connection between people and communities. As of 2019, we’ve developed specific metrics to regularly measure (and share) our social cohesion outcomes. This examination has led to a fundamental change in how we define success. Attendance statistics, financial metrics, and audience demographics are the outputs and outcomes of our work, but we are now called to prioritize our impact—the real difference we are striving to make in the world.
In many ways, our museum has been seen as a leader in the field of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access and is looked to for best practices in community engagement. But as with museums across the country, we now have to take stock like never before. Since our founding, we’ve been known as the “Museum of the People.” But like most museums, we have never fully realized the vision to be of, by, and for all of the people.
Last week, even as I was honored to speak to colleagues across the country about diversity and equity at our virtual American Alliance of Museums conference, I was also called upon by our staff to see, acknowledge, and be held accountable for the inequities in our own institution. These inequities include a lack of black people in key roles, particularly within the curatorial ranks. We’ve heard as well a call for greater transparency and participation by broader staff in decision-making, and respect for roles and expertise that have not been typically valued within museums. Beyond critiques of our institutional practices, I’ve listened to the pain, exhaustion, and despair of black people and people of color with whom I’ve long worked. And I’ve walked the streets of my city and seen murals that appear on the plywood boards that cover broken windows paying tribute to black lives lost and calls for reparation and justice.
As we move through quarantine, we’ve begun to consider how to reinvent our institution when we’re able to reopen our building. That reimagining has become a cry for action from the inside out and the outside in.
So, our journey continues. I know it will take every bit of training and learning and all the tools we’ve developed in recent years. But mostly I know it will require listening with self-awareness, taking a stand with compassion and courage, and reimagining what a museum of, by, and for the people can truly be. Black Lives Matter. Black Thoughts Matter. Black Stories Matter.
Authorities have arrested six people in connection with the theft of a Banksy mural dedicated to victims of the 2015 Paris attacks. The work was recovered in a farmhouse in Italy, near the Adriatic coast, earlier this month.
On a visit to Paris in 2018, Banksy installed the stenciled mural of a somber-looking woman with a veil on a steel door outside of the Bataclan theater to commemorate the 90 lives lost. It had been at large since last January, when hooded thieves removed the piece with an angle grinder.
Now, six individuals have been placed in custody in connection with the crime, which caused widespread anger throughout France, while they await trial. Two have been put under investigation for organized theft and four others have been accused of concealing the theft. While the identities of the suspects have not been revealed, Euronews reports that the local French departments of Isère, Haute-Savoie, Var, Rhône, and Puy-de-Dôme were involved in the investigation.
The work was in good condition when it was found by French and Italian police. The art-adorned metal had been stored in the attic of a farmhouse occupied by Chinese nationals who appeared unaware of the valuable artwork hiding in the uppermost floor.
According to the Evening Standard, one of the French police officers who had intervened during the Bataclan theater attack was also on the scene when the door was rediscovered and “was overcome with emotion.”
When the work was shown to the public this June after its recovery, the French embassy expressed its relief. “It belongs to the Bataclan,” said Christophe Cengig, a liaison of the French embassy, at the event. “It belongs to all of France, in a sense.” He added that the Bataclan theater owners “were thrilled, very happy” that the work had been recovered.
This isn’t the only Banksy to be targeted by thieves. In May, an opportunistic thief in a hazmat suit was caught attempting to steal a Banksy work from a hospital in Southampton, UK, mere days after it was installed.
Reposted from Pinnacol Assurance
For many Colorado businesses, now is the right time to update their hazard communication program to ensure compliance with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration Hazard Communication Standard, 29 CFR 1910.1200.
The standard requires employers with hazardous chemicals in their workplaces to label all containers, obtain safety data sheets (SDSs) and train exposed workers to handle the chemicals appropriately.
The COVID-19 outbreak has prompted lots of businesses to purchase new, stronger chemicals to disinfect high-touch work surfaces, equipment and tools to prevent the spread of the virus. Businesses using these new products more frequently and for longer durations need to ensure they comply with the OSHA standard.
Companies could use the refresher. In fiscal year 2018, hazard communication ranked as OSHA’s second most frequently cited standard.
Keep your employees safe by reviewing these tips and tools. Tips for hazard communication
Add any new cleaning chemicals used for coronavirus disinfection to your chemical inventory list.
Inform and train employees on the hazardous chemicals in their work area before their initial assignment and when new hazards are introduced.
Train employees on the hazards of the new chemicals, appropriate protective measures, and where and how to obtain additional information.
Ensure that all containers of hazardous chemicals in the workplace are labeled.
Instruct your receiving department to review labels on incoming products to ensure all incoming containers of hazardous chemicals have labels that include the following information:
Review the format of SDSs.
Get the SDS for each new chemical and make all of them readily accessible to employees.
Resources for hazard communication
Want to know more about implementing or updating your hazard communication program? Try these tools:
Reposted from The Art Newspaper
The autistic teenager who threw a six-year-old boy from the tenth-floor viewing platform at Tate Modern last summer has been given a life sentence and jailed for at least 15 years. Jonty Bravery picked up and threw a six-year-old boy at the Bankside gallery on 4 August 2019; the victim, a French tourist, suffered bleeding to the brain and fractures to his spine, legs and arms.
In her summing up in court, judge Justice McGowan said: "I cannot emphasise too clearly that this is not a 15-year sentence. The sentence is detention for life. The minimum term is 15 years."
Bravery, 18, who has a personality disorder, was charged with attempted murder after being arrested at Tate Modern; he admitted the charge at the Old Bailey in December. The court heard Bravery had approached a member of Tate Modern staff, saying: "I think I've murdered someone, I've just thrown someone off the balcony."
Justice McGowan added: "You went to the viewing platform, looked around and spotted the victim and his family and went to the boy and threw him over the railing. The fear he must have experienced and the horror his parents felt are beyond imagination.” The judge added that Bravery may never be released.
In a recording obtained by the BBC and the Daily Mail, Bravery told his care workers about a plan to kill someone late 2018 when he was in the care of Hammersmith & Fulham council. In the recording, he says: "In the next few months I've got it in my head I've got to kill somebody." Bravery has been held at Broadmoor Hospital since mid-October.
Reposted from AAM
As of May 7, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West is officially reopened to visitors. The BBCW is a massive AAM-accredited facility located in rural Wyoming in the Yellowstone National Park gateway community of Cody, with a budget of around twelve million dollars. We employ around eighty year-round staff, with an upswell in the three months of summer season when 80 percent of our 170,000 annual guests typically make a visit to us.
Knowing that many other museums have yet to reach this milestone, and may be wondering what reopening is like, I wanted to share what the experience has been like. While I am not a diarist, a diary format is the best way I can think to do that. Before I go on, I should say that we are all different both in the nature of our museums and our communities. My suggestions and timing reflect only my experiences and would need to be modified for anyone who might want to use them.
We knew a closing was coming. While our town had a single case of COVID-19, fear was everywhere and the store shelves were empty. In the span of about twenty-four hours, the governor shut us down, along with other museums, rodeos, schools, and so on. Thankfully, we had a memo in the hopper to send to staff already vetted by outside counsel. I use our attorneys on all staff memos now regarding COVID-19, since I have found these memos have lives beyond our walls. We also had begun work to create signage that addresses our closing in as positive a way as we can. Big “CLOSED!” signs or yellow hazard tape on our playground is the stuff of bad social media postings. So, we opted for softer language noting that it was for the public and staff health that we closed. Messaging is truly important.
Okay, so we have had to figure out a strategy for this. Talk about nailing Jell-O to a wall, as events change hourly! Our framework for survival is thus:
Cripes…talk about lonely at the top. The senior management team is alone working in the building, and despite the huge size of the structure, we see each other probably too much. We are watching every press conference with the governor together in our giant empty conference room. There are myriad opinions about how we should handle everything from previously approved vacation time to recoding the time clocks. The positive in this is that it does force us to make sure our processes and procedures are really tight. Making it up as we go is not the way!
The board is remaining focused and upbeat, and checks are coming in from trustees who want to help. I am thankful, though, that our key trustees have lined up to support retaining all the staff. My messaging has been twofold about the staff: 1. We cannot gut our programs so that when we reopen we are unable to serve our audience. 2. Finding qualified replacements for staff in rural Wyoming, particularly for specialized jobs, is nearly impossible in many cases.
Huzzah, so it looks like we may have a re-opening date. We had already begun meeting with the health officer and set up an internal working group to get us ready. Our strategy is easy. We want to not only meet but exceed both the requirements and the recommendations of the health department. So, we review the minimums and then get creative on how we can take that up a notch. As a result, the first and last thing visitors will see in our building is someone sanitizing. To my mind, public perceptions about cleanliness will be as important as anything we do. I call in extra cleaning staff. We spend hours on signage ensuring that we have clarity on our operations. The hard work has paid off, and in anticipation of an announcement from the governor, we put in place a seven-day countdown to get us ready to open.
Well…I thought this would be a joyous day for everyone, but I sure misread that one! Most of the staff is happy to be back, and they have now disappeared into their offices. But for a small number, there is fear about the reopening, and even fury about being called back to the building. Their anger is manifesting in a campaign to pick holes in all our safety precautions, including suggesting that our cleaning and security staff should force visitors to wash their hands after using the bathroom, which seems impossible to enforce.
Then I have a countermovement from another group of staff who find the sanitation concerns to be excessive, with some even making fun of those wearing masks. It got nasty very fast between the two sides, and I had to intervene and remind everyone that teasing and bullying are not part of our values. My hope is that after we are open that emotions will calm down and we can focus on our guests.
It has been a long week running up to this. I had the exterior of the building cleaned up so that we would look good if we had media coverage. Then the day came, and we had, drumroll please…all of about twenty-five people! In a normal year, we should have had five hundred on that day, but this is the first COVID-19-era opening for us. Still, those twenty-five not only paid to come in, but eight of them bought memberships and four of them bought raffle tickets. I saw a smattering of shopping bags leave with them as well. Half were local and half were tourists. Will their generosity hold?
So, the numbers are slow to rise. The reopening of the National Park has helped, for sure, but we are not tracking well. To date, we are down about ten thousand for the year, but that of course considers the eight weeks closed. Interesting that we are still selling memberships, raffle tickets, and having solid store sales. What is the story there? I think the folks who are coming in are cognizant of us being a charity and being open in tough times, and as a result they are supporting us. It is a little like giving an extra big tip to a server after seeing them for the first time in months.
Lots of lessons learned here. For us, being back open to the public is central to our mission and existence. We don’t have the luxury of staying closed for protracted periods. Right now, our draft budget (July 1–June 30) has scenarios that all include lots of fundraising, and a few that contain staff reductions. I fear the latter more than anything. Having seen the effects of wanton cuts in a prior job, I know the destructive force of death by a thousand cuts. Being back open, I can at least fight to keep us intact.
The Grateful Dead were right that this is a long, strange journey. While I’m not sure Jerry and the boys were anticipating COVID-19, I think it certainly applies to what we have been through. Like all of us, those strange days when this began will forever be etched on my memory. When my grandfather died in the 1970s, we found ration stamps from World War II in his wallet. I suspect that when many of us age out, they will find cloth masks in our pockets we’d been holding on to just in case.
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