Updating the DISARM Red Framework — Goals

Hello friends!

I’m ADAM, a member of the DISARM Foundation team. I help out with lots of different things at DISARM, but my main focus is improving the RED Framework.

How do we plan to improve the Framework?

“Improving the RED Framework” is quite a broad scope, so in order to make the task feel a bit less monolithic, we’ve decided to focus our first set of changes on the Summaries of Techniques and Sub-techniques. Right now some of our techniques have pretty complicated (or even missing) descriptions, so touching these up seemed like a quick win to us. We want the Framework to be broadly accessible; influence operations are already difficult enough to wrap your head around without having to decode DISARM techniques as well. Fixing up Summaries will be a good way to help people more quickly benefit from the framework’s common language.

How will Summaries be updated?

Before setting out to rework summaries, it’d be good to know what we want to achieve with them — what people will get out of reading a technique’s description. With that in mind, here’s our vision for an ideal technique summary, broken down by target audience:

• For an Entry Level analyst, our ideal summary would help them understand the technique, why it counts as Information Manipulation or Interference, and provide them with useful, comprehensible external resources.
• For a Mid Level analyst, our aim is to provide a list of potential outcomes (or “end states”) of a technique’s use, both intended and unintended.
• For an Advanced analyst, we want our summaries to explain the technique’s interplay with Harm, Intent, and Coordination, as well as clues to identify its use in the wild and associated countermeasures.

For every DISARM user, we’re also introducing features for transparency and interaction, like feedback links, update dates, version histories, and contributor lists.

How do we get from here to there?

As we’re making updates to the framework we’ll keep this vision in mind, making sure any changes we make bring us closer to making it a reality. There are a lot of techniques to work through, so we’re prioritising meeting our goals for Entry Level analysts (and adding in transparency content as and when summaries are updated). If you’re subscribed to the DISARM mailing list, we’ll send you notifications whenever we push out a collection of updates.

Please give us feedback

Does this sound like the kind of thing you’d like us to be doing with the RED Framework? I sure hope so, because DISARM is designed for the community (and if we’re not doing the things you want us to do, what’s it all for?)! If there are specific areas you’d like us to focus on or content you believe should be added, let us know at info(at)disarm.foundation! Hearing from people who use the framework is the best way for us to find out what works, and what we should develop further.

The future of the Framework

DISARM is already being used around the world, and — being endorsed by significant coordinating bodies — the number of users continues to grow. We need to continue developing the team, so that we have the capacity to meet the increasing demand for training, support and enhancements.

As a nonprofit 501(c)(3) managing the Open DISARM Framework, we rely on philanthropic support for our ongoing operations. If you are able and interested in supporting DISARM, or you can help us raise funds, please contact jon.brewer(at)disarm.foundation.