Hello everybody, welcome to DEF CON 30s DEF CON groups VR. I'm your next presenter x-ray and I'll be presenting how to start and run a group. So if you've ever wanted to start and run your own group, whether it's a DEF CON group or any other kind of group, we're going to give you the secret sauce. So let me get to my slides here and I'll be right back. Okay. Can you all hear me okay? I assume so. If you're in the back, raise your hand if you can't hear me. Yeah, that always works. Okay. My name is x-ray. I run DEF CON group DC 404 in Atlanta, Georgia. I've been running that since 2013. I'm one of the co-founders of Atlanta locksport. I've also been an affiliates director of the International Jugglers Association, which is in charge of all the affiliate chapters around the world, kind of like DEF CON groups for juggling. I've also been assistant director of the Tampa Bay Jugglers Club down in Tampa Bay, Florida. Great club if you have one another. I'm also a member of the Atlanta Jugglers Association. We held an annual juggling festival. Now you're probably wondering what has juggling got to do with DEF CON groups? Well, the secret sauce is all groups work the same because all groups have a common denominator. It's called people. So while working at Georgia Tech, I was head of cybersecurity from college computing. I sponsored the student hacking and cybersecurity organization called Gray Hat and their CTF team, the Mad Hatters. I'm also a regular presenter of security hacking conferences and co-developer Network King of the Hill CTF, which by the way is a fabulous way of getting your numbers up in your meetings just to host a CTF. So if any of you would like to learn how to do that, contact me on Discord. I'll be happy to walk you through it. It's quite simple. It's Network King of the Hill CTF is designed for the lazy administrator as the original developer. That's exactly what he said about it. It's really easy to set up. Thank you Charmander. Charmander is one of the people I showed how to do it. And if you talk to him later, he'll tell you just how easy it was to do. Okay, so what we're going to cover in this presentation are the fundamental rules for any group. And these are things that apply regardless of the topic. One of the basic issues is who's in charge of the group. That's something that you have to understand in order to understand the dynamics of the group. Because if you don't handle that, it can cause a group to fall apart rather quickly. Another thing we'll discuss is why to meet what you're meeting about and how you figure out what that is and who your target audience is.  Another issue you'll run into as you start putting a group together is what equipment you're going to use. Should I buy the equipment myself? Should the group own the equipment? Can we borrow the equipment? We'll talk about those issues. Do we do presentations? Some group have presenters come in, DC 404 every month. We have a presenter come in and do presentations for us to the group. Hold on a second. Sorry, I had a spam call. You've got to live spammers. They're so persistent. So presentations, do your group going to have presentations or not? It's not required. Are they going to be formal? They don't have to be formal. We'll discuss all of that. Are there going to be any activities you're meeting? Those are things like are you going to have a lockpick village? You're going to have capture the flag, soldering station where people are to solder. Those are some of those ideas. What about governance? This is one that people commonly want to know about is should we be a 501 3C? We'll get into that and what that entails and why you would or would not want to do that. One of the biggest issues you're going to stumble across is money. What happens if we start getting donations? We have dues. We have things like that. How do we deal with money? We'll talk about that. Swag, that's things like t-shirts, cups, all those sorts of things with your logo on it. We'll talk about getting your logo, creating swag, how you can do that, ways you can do that. We'll also talk about advertising your group, where to advertise it and the most effective ways to advertise it. Let's see. Next slide here is fundamental rules. These are rules that apply across all groups regardless. One of them is the most important rule you could ever have in any group and it's something that nobody ever expects. One is you do not have to be the most skilled expert in the room in the group to run it. There are things you have to do to hold the group together and that's the thing that's actually important and you don't even have to be the best at that. You just have to show up and do the number one thing and let's be consistent. I cannot stress being consistent enough. That means if you have a meeting space, you're the first one to get there, the last one to leave. You're going to have to get there early because there's going to be people who show up five minutes before the meeting time, no one's there, they leave. If you're there, they'll stay or they'll show up and say, oh, I just wanted to know there's a meeting. I can't really come today but I'll try back next time. If they see that somebody's there, they'll show up again. They'll also show up five minutes after the event is over and say, oh, you guys are really here. I didn't know if you'd really be here and I waited until the last minute. I'm sorry I'm late and you're there and you talk to them. Be consistent. If no one shows up to the meeting, fine, watch Netflix on your phone. But be consistent. Show up early, leave late. If you can't make it, absolutely make sure somebody is there to cover for you or notify everybody that you're not going to be able to make it. But if you can all help it, always be there or make sure somebody is there. Being consistent is the absolute number one rule, hands down. The other thing is, when you're starting a group, you have to be patient. It doesn't happen overnight. Now to quote something out of a movie, we've probably all seen, the code is more of what you'd call guidelines than actual rules. So that means none of this is hard and fast. It's a matter of who shows up, how compliant they are as far as showing up. Some people won't show up on time. You set them on fire, they won't show up on time. It depends on what kind of group you get as to how hard and fast you have to hold these basic rules. But they're true in any group. Number one, always remember, be consistent. Now the second one is who's in charge. Since you started the group, you think you're in charge. Yeah, that's not true. What I'm going to cover next are the basics. I'll get into governance of the group, which is not the same thing as who is in charge later in the talk. The group is owned by the members. It's not by the person running the group. That's a hard thing to swallow, but that's the way it is. The purpose of the group is for the group. It's not for me. So although I kind of facilitate DC 404, I see myself as more of a host and a servant than I do as somebody who's running the group because it's not my group. If you make changes to what the group is going to do or how you're going to do things, you do that through consensus. You have to get everybody's input. Now, in the end, people are going to look at you to make the final decision. That's just the way human nature works. They'll make their, what they want known. And then you can say, well, the consensus of the group seems to be this, do you all concur? And I'll say, yeah, some will answer some won't. And then that becomes the decision. But decisions are not set in stone. You can always change something. The whole idea is we're hackers. We try things that work. We keep the things that don't work. We get rid of, feel free to throw away things that don't work. It's okay. Now, one thing that is really hard to swallow, and this happens from time to time, is you're going to start a group that has a particular culture to it. And that group's culture will change and go in a direction that you're not willing to follow. And when that happens, you're just going to have to gracefully bow out, leave it to somebody else to run, do a nice turnover, be friendly, and do a nice turnover, turn a group over to somebody else and go start another group or join a different group. That happens occasionally. It's not often, but it does happen. So don't be surprised if it does. It's not the end of the world. If you started one group, you can start another. It's not that big a deal. Okay, now the next thing is why meet? Well, the reason you meet is very simple. We want to talk to other people, just like we're here. We want to talk and hang out with other people who are like-minded into similar things. We say like-minded. Hacking covers a lot of things. Hacking is actually the art of discovering what something is capable of that the designer did not intend and determining whether that's helping me or hurting me. And if it's hurting me, I have to defend against it or help others defend against it. And if it's help, well, then we're going to tell everybody. Now, as an example of that, if there's anybody here, because we allow all skill levels at DefCon meetings, if anybody here is new and doesn't think that they're a hacker, I beg to differ, because you probably opened a can of paint using a screwdriver. That's not the intended purpose of a screwdriver. They actually make a tool specifically for opening cans of paint. You can get it at home deep on loads. That you don't have one. You use a screwdriver like the rest of us. That's hacking. Hacking is a mindset that applies to all disciplines, from golf to playing in a concert, to hacking networks and security systems. And social engineering, which we were talking about earlier. So one of the key things as the person who's hosting the group is be approachable. A lot of people are going to see about the group online. And when they get there, everyone will want to talk to you. So be available and talk to people. Be friendly, engage with them. If you ask them what they're interested in and point out other people in the room might be interested. Also point out, and this is so important, that all the people are at the meeting because they want to talk to other people. So they should not feel bashful or shy about just walking up to a table, sitting down and just start talking to people. It's okay. That's what we're there for. But people forget that and assume that they're not good enough. They're not skilled enough. I'm a noob. Well, I gotta break it to you. I've been doing this since the dawn of the abacus.  So you're, no matter where you go, there's always something you don't know. So that's just the way it is.   I remind them of that. So be excited.  Okay, that's not what I mean by be excited. You show your excitement by your enthusiasm for the subject you're talking about. You don't even have to talk fast. You don't have to talk excitedly. You don't have to wave your hands around. But you'll find that that excitement translates to others and they like being around excited people. And more importantly, get them excited about what they're excited about, not necessarily what you're excited about. That's one of the other key factors in getting a group board. Encourage people to ask the group questions for help. So for instance, if somebody's got a project they're working on or something they're working on, they're stuck, they don't know where to go or, hey, I just want to get started hacking. How do I get, how do I start a group or any question like that? Encourage them to ask the group the question. And the more cross communications and networking you do, the better it works out. The group is going to act like a springboard for members to participate in events outside of the organization. Examples of that are we had this discussion in DC 404. I believe the DEF CON group in Vegas or one of the DEF CON groups actually has their own hacker space. And that's where they hold their DEF CON meetings, their DEF CON group meetings, and they run a hacker space. We discussed that within DC 404 and decided that now DC 404, we wanted to encourage our members to go out into the world and do things as a DC 404 person in the world. So some of the DC 404 members went off and started a hacker space called Free Side Atlanta, still going strong. Many of the members have since moved away, but that group is still continuing because it wasn't a DC 404 thing, it was a hacker space. And it works really well. I go, for instance, I go to the hacker and maker spaces here in Atlanta and teach them basic apps to the flag techniques. I'll do a day of training on how to do web application security and using an attack proxy and all those sorts of things. And the next day we'll run a CTF form and that introduces them to these concepts and encourages them to do that. And then we help them set up their own permanent CTF infrastructure. Okay, so now who's your target audience? First off, be specific.  You have to tell them what you're about and you have to give a description of it. That can be kind of difficult. Why does this stop working? Okay, there we go. Sorry for that interruption. Be flexible. Okay, post requirements about your membership, whatever it is. For instance, DC 404 group, our word DEFCON group, the DEFCON group, we have a webpage where we have our information and our charter on it. And one of the things that specifically says in our meeting post about our meetings is that anybody, any age, any skill level is allowed to come. So we highly encourage that attendance. And then when they get there, we tell them what our group's about at every meeting and encourage that kind of sharing. Now, let's talk about the DEFCON groups for a minute, specifically since we are hopefully you're going to go out and start a DEFCON group. Specifically in the DEFCON charter, it's any age and any skill level. Also, DEFCON frowns on calling yourself a hacking group. Now, despite what was said today, we are hackers. We hack in the sense of the traditional idea, discovering what something's capable of, as opposed to what it was designed to do. But we do not tolerate illegal practices. We regularly give talks on ethics. And one of the things that we found is a great benefit was CTFs and teaching people how to build their own training lab at home with little or no resources, very low resources, usually with thrown away computers that somebody set at the curb, so that they can train in a safe environment and do the things that a black hat would do, but do it in a way that doesn't get them arrested. And then they can come back and demonstrate it and share with the rest of the group. So it's a whole lot of fun. And of course, then we run a CTF so they can practice it in real time. I can't stress having a CTF is so much fun. Okay. Well, now one of the things about DEFCON, another thing about DEFCON groups, if you go read the DEFCON charter on the FAQ right now, there used to be something in there that DEFCON groups are not allowed to require any kind of fees or dues to attend the meetings, that the meetings must be free and open to the public. So that's missing from the FAQ. In doing this, putting its presentation together, we found that missing and notified them, so they'll be adding it back to the FAQ. Okay. Now, now you've got an idea. You've got a target audience. You know what you want to do. You know, you've got an idea. You're excited about it. You've got a few friends are going to help you out even. What do you mean? That is a huge problem. So let me give you a list of some of the things that are the most common things people look for. One is free meeting space and parking. Now, that's not an absolute rule. For a while, DC404 met in a comedy club, and the only parking that was there that was nearby was across the street, and that was a pay parking. You could park a couple of blocks away for free on the street and then walk there, but free parking was not readily available. We now meet at Manuals Tavern. Thank you, manuals, for hosting us for free parking. They give us free meeting space. That's a big bonus. I recommend you, if you look for a space, it's going to handle 20 to 50.  You have to start finding bigger places. If you follow what we're telling you today, it'll grow, and it may take a while, but it will grow. Find a place that's centrally located to the audience that you want to meet. Now, that's a problem in the Atlanta area. Because the metro area is so large, we have roughly five DC groups in our area scattered all over the place. Now, what's really interesting is people would think that that's competition. It's not. It actually generates more excitement because people go to multiple meetings because they're just so excited about it. So that's not really a problem. And we all communicate on the same Discord server. We each have our own channel, but we all communicate together. And so there's a lot of excitement for DEF CON group activity in the area. And we all help each other out with what they're doing. So they have centrally located to the area of the city that they're trying to make it easier for people to travel to. Wow, we're having some fun today with some social engineering. Hey, that's to be expected, right? We're a hacking conference centrally located to the group that you're trying to meet with. Now, that can be a challenge. Like here in Atlanta, during rush hour and especially when we meet at manuals Tavern, that's down in the central part of the city. It's not uncommon for them to have some major city-wide event that makes getting the manuals Tavern rather difficult at times. So that becomes an issue in picking where your location is. But for us, that worked out actually pretty well for a majority of the people in Atlanta. But for the other groups, they're far outlying. Some of them are on an hour's drive from where we are. And at rush hour, you just can't get there from here type of problem. So find something that's located centrally in your group. Preferably not too noisy. Because if you want to do presentations, you're going to need someplace quiet. However, that's not in this part. They have two different rooms. One is kind of off by itself. And it's rather quiet. And we can do presentations with no problem. The other one is called the Eagle's Nest. And it is extremely noisy because it's right next to their main dining area. And they have, quote, a soundproofing curtain that they pull across that does absolutely nothing to the sound. But that was supposedly the intent when they remodeled. Hey, it's free space. We make the best of it. We improvise. We adapt to overcome. But that could be a bit of a challenge sometimes. That's why we use a PA system so that we can talk over that. Another one that's kind of important, depending on what you intend to do, what kind of activities you're going to have at your meetings is free internet. If they have Wi-Fi, that's highly advisable, especially if you want to run something like Capture the Flag. Now, another thing you're going to want to look for is do they have any facilities for doing presentations, assuming you want to do them? Not all of our DC groups do presentations at their meetings. A lot of them just get together and hang out and talk about whatever they're working on. Ours, DC404, we promote people doing presentations. In fact, DC404 members regularly present at DEF CON and other conferences. So we always want to have a live presentation. So we make sure that wherever we need has a PA system. And if not, we provide our own. We have one of the members who will bring one with him and we can use their PA system. Look for a free projector and a screen. Our large screen TV also works rather well. In some cases, we found places that they have a projector that they charge for the use of the projector, but the use of the screen was free. No problem. We brought our own projector. Now, I know what you're thinking. I remember thinking this too. I can't afford to buy a projector. Well, Worth would let me check one out. I told him what it was for and they said, oh, yes, we're supported doing that. Sure. Check one out. And so I was able to check out a projector from work and bring it with me and we can do presentations that way. Or if you are a member of a church, a lot of times a church has a projector and you can borrow it from your church. That's an example. So ask your friends, ask around, see what you can find. You don't always have to buy it in order to provide it. Oops. Okay. Another thing you look for is whether or not they have food and adult beverages, meaning beer, wine, that sort of thing. If they have food and they have beer and wine, that goes a whole long way to helping the group congeal together and work together. People can come. They can have lunch or what time of day you're doing it. They can have lunch, have a beer, talk to their friends. It really makes a huge difference. So DC44 always looks for a place that has food and adult beverages. One of the big issues is will they provide separate checks? Ask first up front. What you don't want is having a meeting where people come and go and at the end of the meeting, they walk up with one big bill. You don't know who ordered what. Half the people have already left. You don't want that. You want separate checks. Also make sure to make an announcement to the group. Don't forget to pay your tab. We don't want to hunt you down later. It's just a friendly reminder. It also helps if they accept reservations for your meeting space. We've had places where we said, hey, we'd like to reserve this room. They said, well, we really don't do reservations and we get there in our big room, had three people and having a conversation and we were picked off to some side room where there wasn't enough room. So make sure that they accept reservations if you want to make sure you get a space. Places you can go look for a meeting place are things like public libraries. Now public libraries are a good place to start. Problems are they don't typically allow food or drinks. They usually require that meetings be open to the public. Now for DC44 meetings, that's not a problem for F-Con meetings because they are supposed to be open to the public. But if your group wants to have a closed meeting, that's not going to work for you because it has to be open to the public. Another place that people often don't think about are churches. Churches often provide free parking and meeting space. So if any of the members of your group are a member of a church, talk to them and see if they've got meeting space at their church. Quite often they even have Wi-Fi as well and a projector on a screen works out really good. In some cases they have a kitchen and as long as you're willing to clean the kitchen up afterwards, you can make or bring your own food or have your pizza brought in, whatever. Works out pretty well. Hubs and restaurants, those are another good place to look for. Quite often they do support meeting space and they try to host events. Now places that I don't recommend going are things like sports bars. We've had instances in the past where a sports bar had a space that would work perfectly. We told them that we can make sure that that room is completely full and that they have standing room only with our group being large enough and easily meet any requirements for the amount of money they want you to spend to use their space. However, they said that no, our primary clientele is the people coming here for sports and if our room is tied up and they can't get in, well then it gives us a bad name and they don't come back. So we said, oh, sorry, we can't use your space then. That's the way it goes. Some places are going to want to charge you rent for the space and they want a guaranteed amount on the bill. In other words, they want you to spend so much money and if not, there's a fixed amount you're going to have to pay if you don't order enough food and beer and that sort of thing. I would try to avoid those places. It's hard. We had, when manuals have been closed for renovations, it took us a great deal of time to find another place that could host us and it wasn't free, but because we were a group open to the public, they gave us a discount and one of the members went to his company and the company paid for years worth of meeting space for us until manuals finished their renovations. So you can find ways, be inventive, be hackers basically. Another place to look, and this is one that people often forget, are universities, schools, and community centers, especially community centers. Quite often they have free space to use or go to another organization and ask them if you can use their space. An example is the Atlanta Jugglers Association has a space in the Little Five Points Community Center that we pay rent on and that's where we have our meetings. Well, they'll make that space available to other groups and the parking's free. So that's, now in those cases we usually charge the groups, but depending on what the group is and when they want to meet and what it's for, especially if members of the AJA want to be present, the Atlanta Jugglers Association, like myself want to be present, they'll often waive the fee. So that's a place you can look. Local high schools and elementary schools can sometimes have a space available to have meetings, especially if they're open to the public and especially if the kids can come, which deaf con groups can. Universities, usually at a university, depends on the university, you're going to have to have somebody who's at the university sponsor the event. Now, sponsor doesn't mean they pay for anything. It just means they say, yeah, I vouch for them and then you'll be able to have a meeting in one of their meeting spaces. Now meeting spaces quite often allow food and drink, but you'll have to provide it yourself, but they will allow that. Now have all the stuff like projectors and parking, all that. Now, some schools charge for parking. Georgia Tech, there's no free parking anywhere in the campus. Other schools like Kennesaw State, they have free parking everywhere. So those are some examples. Now, one of the things you really have to learn to do is be flexible. You can, for instance, look for, if everything else fails, see if any of the members of your group, if their company can provide meeting space. That happens quite often where a company wants to sponsor a meeting space and we've had companies for some of the groups I'm a member of, we've had the company provide the meeting space and pay for pizza for all the meetings. In the case of 768, I think it is a DC group up in Hardishville. Their meetings up there, there's a member who comes and pays for the first hundred dollars of the bill for whatever they get, just pays for every meeting. And they got free space in the basement of a restaurant they go to. So that is a great benefit if you can get a sponsor. It's not required. Now, one thing I cannot stress enough about meeting spaces is you're going to have to be flexible with the people who provide the space. For instance, because of COVID, we're doing hybrid meetings. We have some online and some in person. And as a result of that, we've had the problem of not enough people showing up to merit the larger space that they have there. So they moved us to the Eagle Center, which is smaller, but a lot noisier. Now, we could try to get upset about that, but no, what we do is the vendor has been extraordinarily gracious to us in providing free space and helping us and working with this, with our group through thick and thin. They've been there for us all the way through COVID, in fact. So we really, really are flexible with them and work with them as ever possible.  Could you, could you stop right at four? I say, sure, no problem, or even stop early. Whatever their requirements are, we try to be as flexible as possible with them. By doing that and being nice, it's amazing what the vendors will do or the people who provide the space will do to help you out and become the preferential person that they'll deal with. You have a question? Somebody raised their hand over there. Oh, guess not. Okay. Okay. Now, where do you get the equipment? Things like projectors and things like that. Well, one we already talked about, you can borrow or buy it. Now, one of the questions you're going to have to answer, if you buy equipment, things like projectors, screens, PA systems, wireless microphones is, who owns it? In my case, I paid for it all personally out of my pocket. It's my equipment because I wanted to have a meeting and the people who started DC-404, which is Dr. Chaos and Beth, went on the road and gave me the bag of holding and said here, hold this. And I ended up being the host for DC-404 meetings. Well, when they left, they were the ones who brought projectors and screens and mics and that sort of thing. So I said, oh, I guess that's me now. Well, at first, I started borrowing stuff. I signed it out from work. I told them what I wanted it for. And they said, sure, no problem. And I'd borrow it from work. And over time, I collected enough equipment and got stuff together to do that. Now, if you do buy equipment, you're going to have to decide, is it owned personally or is it owned by the group? If it's owned by the group, where do you store it? How do you make sure it ends up at every meeting? You'll have some says, oh, I'll store it at my house.  So you have to make plans for that sort of problem and you have to handle them in advance. Usually whoever the host of the meeting is is going to have to iron those issues out and make sure that it's handled. Quite often, you're going to find that the only person who cares that much about the meeting is the host. You started the group, you should care. However, over time, you're going to have more people come along and help out. Charmander's here today, he's there in the back left corner of the stands. He has been a great help. CommaGur is another one that comes along. We've got about eight people who are core group who come all the time and help out. Smoke and Teebur is another one. They'll step in at a moment and say, I don't even have to ask them. It's more like get out of the way, let me help. It's awesome when people start coming along. It'll take time, but you'll get there.  That's one that can sit like two, three feet from the wall and project a full screen on the wall. Sometimes you're living in space and you won't be able to set your projector 15, 20 feet back so you can get an image big enough. So I recommend a short throw projector. Another thing you can look at is in order to set the projector on something, it's quite often you get to the room, the tables have got people at them. There's condiments, there's plates of food, there's water, there's coffee. No place to put your projector. The solution for that is make a flat mounting plate for your projector that the projector bolts, it's just a piece of wood, your projector bolts to it and it's got a quarter 20 screw mount on it to screw onto the top of a tripod. It allows you to just set a tripod on the floor, set a couple of chairs around it so people trip over the chairs and it'll be a projector and set it up so it projects on the screen the lines. It's totally probably to put it in any space, just works. And if you don't need it, you can put it on a table, you just put it on a table. If you need a portable projector screen, one that's excellent, gives you a wide screen, it's very small, very light and portable, it's made by Epson called the Alk Acolyde Duet. I have one of those, I actually saw it because I needed to borrow one for a conference, I borrowed it from work and I was so impressed by this piece of equipment, I wouldn't have bought one. They're absolutely awesome portable screens. Okay, wireless microphones. If you get wireless mics, you're going to need a handheld and a lavalier for the speaker, handhelds for the host and also walking around having people ask questions, lavaliers for the speaker. If you can get PA speakers that have a built-in amplifier, so it's an all-in-one unit, you can just take the two speakers apart, set them up, either stand or set them on the ground or put them on stands, sometimes they come with stands and connect your wife, your microphones to it and go to town. It'll have a mixture built into the back. That's the cheapest way to go if you buy your own PA. Now for us, manuals has a built-in PA system, so we don't have to have it, but when we were meeting at our alternate location, that's the 57th Fighter Squadron, when they were doing renovations, we provided our own PA, one of our members brought it. For now, is equipment required? Absolutely not. DC770, which meets the basements of Jeffersons, doesn't have any equipment, they don't have any speakers, sometimes they'll have a speaker, but they're group solid if he just stands up and talks, no slides, nothing. Now that's highly encouraged because that's the whole point of being there, so we get together and talk about stuff. Well, let's talk about presenters and speakers. They're not required and it depends on your group mission or your audience, whether you want to have speakers. DC404 members speak at hacking and information security conferences, so we use our meetings so that they can do beta runs of their presentations. When we do that, we don't record them or anything, so if you want to say you have to be there, but we do those beta runs there. We also use our meetings to encourage new members to learn speaking skills, so they can stand up in front of everybody and um and on, oh my gosh. All the usual things that they have to learn to get around in public speaking, we give them that opportunity to practice those skills there in front of a friendly audience and also to learn this as a skill that they can use in their profession, whatever that may be. It's a valuable skill, so we encourage everybody to learn how to present at our meetings, but it's not required, but you can decide whether you want to do that or not. Okay, what kind of activities do you have at your meeting? What is it that gets people excited? Well, this is where it gets a little interesting because we discovered this kind of accident in DC404. At juggling groups, we have juggling where they're to juggle. Everybody brings their own props, usually enough props for them and somebody else to juggle together, at least them and one other person. That's typically people who want to pass objects, the juggling club will bring enough objects for them and one other person, because the other person might not have brought enough of the right kind or anything at all, for that matter. So, plan with that in mind. For instance, we host Network King of the Hill CTF. Now, this is a CTF that's very, very easy. If you go to github.com, netcoth, that's November, Echo Tango, Kilo, Oscar Tango Hotel, Net, N-E-T-K-O-T-H, Network King of the Hill. If you go to that github page, it explains what it's about. And if you also go to netcoth.org, there's more information there as well. It'll explain how to set up and run the CTF. If anybody's interested in doing one of these, feel free to contact me. My contact information is the end of the presentation. I'll go over it. I'm on the Discord for the DEF CON groups. You can also get a hold of me there. You can also go to dc404.org and connect through the mailing list or our DEF CON groups. There's an invite there on the email to our DEF CON, our Discord for Atlanta Subsecurity Engineers, where dc404 has a channel. So, connect with me and I'll happily help you get set up and working your own capture of the flag. I cannot stress enough how exciting this was for the group. Part of the reason is you think about it. We come to DEF CON, we hear about all these wonderful things you can do and things you can try, but most of them, if practiced in the wild, would unfortunately get you arrested. We teach you how to set up, the CTF, gives you an avenue to practice these skills in a competitive environment. And when I say competitive, it's a friendly competitive environment because of the way King of the Hill works. I'm not going to go into the mechanics of King of the Hill right now, but it's a really, really fun thing. In fact, as some of the people here who are from DC44, I see Charm Ender over there, for instance, ask some of our members what Never King of the Hill is like. They'll tell you how exciting it is. And it is whoever hosts the capture of the flag is actually a live admin of the event. So, you're acting as a live blue team against people who are part of the challenge. It's a whole lot of fun to both admin it as well as participate in it. We also have a lockpicking village. That also happened by accident. Here's the thing. I like lockpicking. I learned it in the Navy way back in the 70s when you couldn't buy picks. You had to make your own. And I just liked it. So, I went to a B-Sides and at the B-Sides was a lockpick village run by Tool.  And I went, oh, this is awesome. And Tool was selling this very rudimentary set of lockpick tools. And I said, oh, my goodness, my lockpick's broken. This is great. I can buy a set. I bought it. I was very excited. So, I went home and made my own lockpick work station, started getting a DC4 phone means because I'm interested in lockpicking. Oh, me, hold. Other people tried it. Then all of a sudden people said, oh, there's people here interested in lockpicking. I'm interested in lockpicking too. Next thing we know, smoking keyboard shows up and he is, I thought I was into lockpicking until I met him. He shows up with an entire village of equipment and sets up a village every time. So, he and I together co-founded Atlanta Locksport and now Atlanta Locksport has their meetings inside the DC4 for meetings and hosts a lockpick village at our meetings. This has spilled out all over the place because people who come to the DC4 for meetings also hear about the other DEF CON groups in the area. They also hear about Atlanta 2600. So, all of a sudden, we said, the guy who runs 2600 is the DC4 form member. He starts running the cash in the flag at 2600. All of a sudden, we go from five people sitting in the food court to 35 to 40 people sitting in the food court and, oh, what do you know? They start bringing their locks too. So, now we're sitting in the middle of the food court at this at Lenox Mall, running a CTF and having a lockpick village. So, yes, it will explode like crazy if you give people some way to vent all this experience and knowledge they're getting, especially in DEF CON groups going online and listening to these talks. They can actually do it for real in a safe, legal environment. That's really important because, you know, I kind of get to like you guys and it's really a bummer when I try to send you cookies in jail and they come through just a box of crumbs. It's terrible. Okay.  That's a whole lot more fun. Another thing that started was one of the members came in to DC44 and said, hey, I've got a bunch of stuff that I no longer need. Like, they upgraded some stuff in your home lab. They have some technical books that they no longer need because that was the first edition. They have a second edition now. They said, could we bring that and give it away at the meeting? They said, yeah, sure. So, they brought a big plastic bin with this stuff. Well, then everybody else started bringing in stuff and putting in the bin. And then people will go from all the meetings in Atlanta, all the other DC groups, they'll bring the bin to all the giveaway bin to all the other groups and you put stuff in. You don't want, you take stuff out. You want things like swag stickers. You don't know what to do with it. You got from some other conference. You don't really want, you put them into the bin. All kinds of fun stuff comes out there. I've seen people give away raspberry pies because the upgraded got a new one. They put a raspberry pie in there. All kinds of fun stuff. That's another thing. But posters, books, hardware. I've had people put whole computers in the bin. Laptops, all kinds of stuff.  So DC 404 set up a Google chat channel. And if you want to coordinate with other people at the event to go out to dinner, to go to, go to talks as a group, those sort of things. Everybody can chat. They can use it on their phone. They can use it on their computer. And what's really fun about that is people like myself who can't actually make it to the meeting, I can follow along with my friends that are at Def Con and hear what's going on and be excited with them. So that's one way you can keep the excitement going when people aren't even there. Okay. Another thing, and this is one of our members brought this, is he wanted to teach people how to solder. So he brings a soldering station with him and sits down and teaches people how to do soldering. Another member designs, if you're familiar with the shitty add-ons that go on the badge, like the Def Con badge, that has a little connector on it. So a lot of cons have, it's a standard now, this little connector, you can plug on an additional daughter card onto the main board.  There's the actual standard for that interface now, well the standards it gives with hackers. And there's people in our group who design and build those and bring in prototypes for people to try out and play with. DC-404, it's part of swag. One of the members went out and had made some add-on with the DC-404 logo and everything else. And we sold them to people and they were able to take them with them to Def Con and trade them for other add-ons. A whole lot of fun.  Now let's talk about governance. And governance is where to get serious. That's the overarching plan of how we're going to govern how people meet. Whenever you get people together, they automatically start forming hierarchies and forming ways of organizing the situation. It all depends on what it is your group needs in order to meet that is going to determine what kind of governance you're going to use. Now the first type we'll talk about is what's called anarchistic. There's no leader. There's no one who's officially even a host. There's the people who tend to be going there along this and people will ask them questions simply because they've been going there the longest. Think of this as people who show up at the same location based on a history of the meeting. An example would be a pickup basket game at the city public court. It's always every Saturday you go out there. There's people playing basketball in the court. You walk on, there's nobody in charge. You want to play, you play. If you don't want to play, you sit by the sidelines, talk, chat, whatever. It's just completely anarchistic. There's nothing formal. Just show up, hang out, and talk. The rules, think of the rules as like kids agreeing on how to play a game. There's no rules on how to do that. You just kind of sit down and kind of give and take and figure out what you're going to do just by who showed up. That's how that kind of works. Now, you'd think that a long term that would never ever work. I beg to differ. The MIT Juggling Club, which is one of the oldest clubs probably in our country, has been meeting that way since their inception. Basically, their organizational principle is this. There's juggling outside this one building and if it's raining, we go inside through the atrium inside. Those are the rules. It happens every Tuesday or something, whatever the day of the meeting is. Why is it like that? Because that's the way it's always been. People just show up. It's been one of the longest running groups in the country. It's amazing. I marvel at their ability to organize despite doing nothing to organize. It's crazy. That's what happens when you show up and you're excited. The next type is loose. Now, loose is what DC 404 does. That means you only need one person to be consistent at a minimum. You have to have one person who's consistent and dedicated to make things going. Decisions are by consensus. Remember, kids playing together, right? But there is one person who's kind of in charge. They don't tell people what to do, but they facilitate the conversation. They act as the moderator of the conversation. You'll end up eventually with a core group that just shows up regularly and helps. You won't be able to tell them no. They'll show up and help whether you want them to or not. They'll help you set up chairs. They'll help you take stuff down. They'll help you load your car. They'll do whatever you need. They'll beg you to help out and try to help out. And if you don't let them, they'll do it anyway. They'll just show up because they're excited.  We do a lot more than that at our meetings. Those are just some of the highlights. You may or may not have an official charter. It's not required.  It's very minor. It's not very difficult to do. I'll leave the link at the end of the presentation. I'll tell you what it is. And you can always go to, if you look at this URL here that's hanging in mid-space here, you can get a copy of my presentation which has all the links at the end of it. There's no formal rules in the sense of how we do things. It's just a matter of kind of like anarchistic. It's like, well, we get together. We have a presenter. We always give feedback to the presenter on how they can help improve their presentation if they need any help with that. We ask them if they want that kind of feedback and if they do, we give it to them. And we give them a great round of applause. We ask them questions and we make them feel wanted and thank them for their presentation. And we also make time open for people to just share whatever it is they're working on. Nothing formal, no presentation required. You want to get up and ask the question of the group. I'm stuck on something or, hey, I want to know, is anybody here interested in this? Raise your hand. Okay. I'm going to come talk to you. And then they put down the mic and they go over there. We open it to the floor for people just to share whatever they're working on. For instance, when we get back after this DEF CON, our first meeting this is Saturday after we get back from DEF CON, we don't have a presenter. It's all about people debriefing. What did they see in here while they were at DEF CON that really impressed them that they'd like to share with the group? And that's what the meeting's about. Okay. DC-44 is a prime example of a loose governance system. Whoa. I'm in the wrong window. I'm going to try that. Okay. Now, the next one's formal. Now, you may actually have been part of a formal organization, but most of us probably haven't. A formal organization runs like a business. They have elected officers. Regular meetings are the officers that separate from the group meetings. The meetings run, when they have meetings of the officers, they're run according to Robert's rules of order. They take minutes. They publish the minutes. They have published policies, procedures, and membership requirements.  Now, whenever you do that, if you want to be a 501 3C, remember, this is a legal entity. This means there's legal requirements to go along with those. If you fail to live up to those requirements, there are legal repercussions like fines and possibly prison. So, if you're going to be a 501 3C, make sure you understand what you're getting into. There's no doing it like it's a hobby.  If you're doing it formally, it's more like a business. You can't just decide as the CEO of a business, I'm not going to do that anymore and just not show up. That's not a cool thing to do. So, you have to realize that when you do that, it impacts the other members of the business and can have legal repercussions if you're a 501 3C. Now, the next one, and this is the last one, is what's called hybrid. Hybrid is rather interesting. It's a combination of loose and formal. Now, this example, if somebody asked me if this would work, I'd tell them no. Unfortunately, I've seen it work more than once in practice. Atlanta Jugglers Association is a prime example of this. They are 501 3C3 charitable organization. They do have formal business meetings. There are loose minutes that are published as to the results of that meeting. At that meeting, they vote for the business officers. That's the president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, that sort of thing. You have to have members of the core group who are willing to fill those roles. We jokingly do things like El Presidente for life and things like that, but they might be the president for 20 some years in a row simply because they're doing a good job and nobody wants to have a coup or a takeover. Although, one year we did have a coup, but it was kind of a funny thing because the guy wanted to step down. So we said, we're going to have a coup. We're a problem. Charles is president who didn't want it, so Jay ended up doing it. But anyway, the meetings themselves, however, are completely anarchistic, just like MIT Juggling Pond. Jugglers are kind of that way because the idea is you want to just show up and juggle with each other. The only way to do that is just cooperate. And we've been showing up and doing it for over 30 years at the same location. So everybody just expects there's jugglers out on the lawn. If it's not raining, if not, they're indoors in the kitchen area. And if not there, they're up in their juggling space up by the theater. We, they meet at a, the, what do you call it, not Civic Center, the, I said it at the first slide. What was that? I can't remember what it is. It's a Civic Center, like a Civic Center, local Civic Center, that's there in little five points and you can rent space in it, but it's also open to the public for free events. And so there's all kinds of stuff going on there. There's a lot of artistic groups there and there's even a theater group that meets there. And Atlanta, Atlanta Governor's Association runs as a hybrid group. Even though they're 501c3, they're a very loose organization. They run mostly by consensus. They do have a president, a dictator for lifetime, a title who's the official president. When somebody says, I need to speak to somebody official, that's the person who answers that. They have all the legal requirements. They meet all the legal requirements. They do all the bookkeeping that's required, all that sort of thing. But as far as the meetings go, they're just anarchistic, just like the MIT Jugglers Club does. And it works. They're not the only organization that runs that way. That's what's so amazing about it. Now let's talk about money. Now this is true regardless of any kind of governance type. If you have money involved, you must be transparent. Open a bank account from the group. You have to have multiple people able to access the account and you must have regular financial reports and it must be made to the group. Money or resources can be donated. You can have dues or pass the hat at meetings. Just remember that by charter, DC-404, but DEFCON groups cannot have dues or fees as their meeting. Now that doesn't mean that people can't just decide to donate money to your DEFCON group. But if you do that, make sure that you do the formal accounting so that people see transparently where the money is and what's being done with it. You can get a corporate or private sponsor for your group. That's quite doable. We have a sponsor paid for our space as an example. Swag. This is something I'll tell you. If you create a logo, do it as a work for hire or have somebody assign this copyright to you because if you don't, it can get a little sticky when you start selling swag. DC-404 is kind of in that vein. We have a very famous local artist or more like infamous local artist who was the progenitor of our logo. It was based on something he did. He gave us permission to use it as long as we only sold t-shirts and swag to DC-404 members. That means I can give you something that has our swag on it that I paid for but I can't sell it to you. We can't sell it publicly. In order to do that, there's two ways you can do it.  We had a member do that recently with our challenge coins, which by the way are Prima.  The other is we have a Zazzle account where we go in and create things like cups and magnets and t-shirts and things for conventions and we make those available to DC-404 members to buy but those links are not open to the public. So you can have all kinds of swag and you can go either bank it yourself with the money up front or use a service like Zazzle and there's more than one, that's just an example one, to make it available to anybody who just buy them whenever they want and you just put them up there. Okay advertising, we're running out of time here so let me get going. You need to feed relevant content and encourage discussions on the topics and issues that your site is about or your group is about. Things that I would recommend. For instance, we have an email list, we have a discord channel, we have an IRC server although there's myself and one other guy in the IRC server so it's kind of dying. There's a Twitter page if you want somebody to have somebody who admins that and responds to things, you can also have Facebook, Slack and really this is the big one is Meetup. Now Meetup costs a lot of money but every time I ask at a meeting who here is here the first time, a bunch of hands are going, like five to ten hands are going, I'll say how did you find out about us? Nine out of ten will say Meetup. So Meetup is where people seem to be going to find things of interest. The problem is Meetup is hideously expensive.  Now the way we got around that is one of our members started a Meetup channel for doing some security training he was doing and he moved and he turned that over to us and said here you can have it till the thing runs out. Well one of our members took over paying for it and instead of just being for DC404 it's for all the groups in Atlanta that's on our Discord server have advertisement for their group thing so we were able to amortize that across the entire thing. All of us kind of chip in money to help the guy pay for it. So I can't tell you how impactful Meetup has been. I hate to say that because the service is so darned expensive but man do they pull people in like nobody's business. Okay that's pretty much a wrap up. Sorry I had to rush the last slide there. If you want to contact me I'm xrayatnoboxlabs.com that's n-o-b-o-x-l-a-d-s.com that's xrayatnoboxlabs.com you can also contact me at AtlantaLockSport.org or netcost.org you can contact me through those and if you're looking for resources the link to my presentations is right up there and one of the things that's on my website is a thing on how to get started hacking there's also a connection to all the Atlanta information security resources in the Atlanta area there's links to capture the flag and pentasty training tools as well as a link directly to somebody raised their hand had a question no okay there's also a link to the DEF CON groups page and that's hctbsforum.defcon.org slash social-groups all over the case so that's forum.defcon.org slash social-groups and that's where you can find out the information and sign up for a DEF CON group now if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me I'll be happy to help you and getting started help work through finding a place to meet whatever you need to help out you're getting your group started even if it's not a DEF CON group give me a call I'll be guide to help you out or if you're interested in learning how to do capture the flag or starting a lock group big village or whatever in your group give me a call I'll be happy to help any questions wow I must have been a really good speaker okay so okay let me


Abstract carbon dots, CDS, synthesized from small organic molecules, have gained significant interest due to their unique properties, including low-cost, ease-of-surface modification, high photoluminous, water solubility, and low toxicity. These features make them ideal for use in various applications, such as photocatalysis, drug gene delivery systems, bio-imaging, chemical and biological sensing, photodynamic and photothermal therapies. The synthesis of CDS can be divided into two main approaches, top down, where larger structures are broken down into nanoparticles, and bottom up, where CDS are formed from smaller organic molecules. This review provides an overview of the synthetic strategies used to produce CDS from small organic molecules, with particular focus on hydrothermal-solvothermal treatment, microwave irradiation, ultrasonic treatment, and thermal decomposition. Additionally, the potential applications of CDS in the fields of bio-imaging, drug gene delivery systems, fluorescence-based sensing, photocatalytic reactions, PDT, and PTT are discussed. This article was authored by Honorud Sharma and Joydeep Das. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


that do not pursue free education or is managing back-on-economic programs that are not beneficial for their people. These were the words of poet, publisher, editor, activist, palmist, audio or film during the public presentation of a comperdium of its essays, tributes and conversation which held in Lagos. Plastific correspondents love Iku Koyadoku tells us more in this report. These are friends of Audia Ofemou, a man who weighs many hearts. They have put every other thing aside to mark his 73rd birthday by putting a book together in his honor. Some know Audia Ofemou as a poet, others as publisher, editor, activist, polemicist, mental and a politician. It tells me I have delivered some but I have not finished delivering and that I must continue working. And I suppose this is one way of not letting me forget that once upon a time I made promises to friends. Even promises I did not make but who they expected me to fulfill. The book titled Audia Ofemou, in search of a common morality, essays, tributes and conversation was reviewed by a veteran journalist and columnist Ruben Abati. The occasion was void of the usual dining and waiting, synonymous with birthday celebrations. It was more of a time for speeches and tributes. The book presentation provided an avenue for the celebrants to renew his course for free education in Nigeria. Senior advocates of Nigeria, Femi Falano and others found at what they termed as dollarization of the Nigerian economy. The consensus here is that the book of the Audia Ofemou, in search of a common morality, essays, tributes and conversation is a must read and recommended for schools. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Hi, good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all of you from different time zones making some time to attend this webinar organized by Product School. First of all, I would like to thank Product School for this amazing opportunity to interact with a lot of product talents around the globe to share some information or knowledge that I have in product management. And today I'm going to be focusing on how to create road maps or a guide to creating road maps. And I'm Apuva, I work as Lead Technical Product Manager at Nike. And today I'll be focusing on this topic and I'm very happy to be doing this. And please feel free to ask questions or maybe like clarify if you have any questions on this session in the chat or or and even if you would like to see a follow up on the topic, I'm happy to help. And today's topic I will try to of course cover as much as I can on product road map. What are the core principles and road map? I will try to cover as much as I can, but I need your help in order to ensure that everything is covered and and if there are some open topics or if you need to have a follow up, please do let me know. All right, so okay, so what is a product road map? According to my product more roadmap is a speaking document of what the product vision strategy is goal is and it is basically attached to the organizational objectives and goals that they want to achieve and your product could be part of a big portfolio of products by organization or maybe a part of it. It could depend on what kind of product you're working, what is the scale and volume of the product, but it's really important for you to understand what is your product vision, where do you want to go in larger scheme of things and how do you want to make that happen? And to start with there are all this like a like a product roadmap pyramid because the pyramid that I'm showing you should be as a part of the roadmap documentation it should be in in some in some of the other that is like really not stuff that you want to achieve in your product. It does it cannot be true for you to achieve in like in one month or two months this is really really far fetched that you want to see your product evolve into something amazing that that you think and and it's also attached to the organizational goal so that is the product vision and you really really need to think what it is and believe in that and and pass on that energy or synergies to rest of the organization as well. So I think that's something you really need to take time and work with the leadership team with with your different stakeholders with pretty group you really need to understand that and bring that out of that and what a strategy you have like a vision that five years down the line you want to be here as a product or maybe one year or three year doesn't matter but you really need like actionable like an execution plan on how you want to do that and this execution plan will really only define what are all the successful steps to make this go a milestone towards that vision that you have set so this is the strategy part and this does this basically gives you a clear idea of how you want to go how you want to start with this in the product and the next step I call is a goal and and goal is usually like very time bound and you know what you really want to achieve with a specific metric for example you could say that I want to increase my I want to increase the customer engagement from a percentage to b percentage within three months time so you really really fix specific metric and you say within three months time you want to make this happen and show that result and this goal needs to be like one of your goal and and you need to know as a part of that what are all the steps that can that can achieve that and that's like the high level goal that you want to have in your product and you can have like customer engagement retention many different teams that you can follow in the goals based on what very crucial to fix what you want to do in your product and the next level item is initiative and initiative is basically like a broad team of I would say like tasks or features even that unite into one and they become an initiative and this does not mean that this whole initiative is owned by just the product team or or or engineering team but it's it's something that could be shared across different across different parts of the organization which means that there can be different business unit different group who can help you in making this initiative successful so it might not be like a only a product engineering team to make this successful but it could be a joint effort by multiple different groups like sales marketing and many others legally when you don't know so it depends on what your initiative is and and you really need to understand like all of these features who needs to do what and how does it come together so that is the initiative level plan and feature I think everybody here would know about feature and and and usually when you're working in product or even if you're outside product knowing that there is a product in your organization the one word that you know is feature and it is a very interesting word because like a lot of times functions features everything is feature initiative becomes feature goal becomes feature so it's really like externally when you look all of those themes are translated into feature but it's really important to understand what a feature is feature is actually just a piece of that product either like a part of that functionality or something like a third party application that that basically makes your product successful so you you really need to like sometimes clarify in your organization what what a feature means so it's very specific piece of working function on your application and and that means it can add value to your users of customers in a in a direct or indirect way and I and I it really needs to have a direct value drop and that's very valuable to know in feature because if you don't have any value drop in a feature then it's not featured at all so you really need to know what what is a feature and how do you define that and time frames part time frame is so important and I think everyone who's working outside product engineering will find that super useful because they need to know when this will be done when it will be complete when can I use this so this is something very very valuable for I would say not just for product engineering but for the rest of the group including leadership and and any other stakeholder and business units and and and one of the things that the roadmap should contain is time frames and why because you need to show the time frames in which you are you are executing all of these initiative features and and how that goal attached to that is delivered so this is very valuable for everyone so this is basically a high level understanding of what a roadmap is so the next one I'm going to jump onto is like why do we need road maps so basically from in so the roadmap is like a super effective way to communicate different parts of the organization as I already mentioned so everybody wants to know when something is done and your product could be serving either one or more customers to one user group to multiple user group and there might be different each of the organization have different way of organizing the stakeholder group sometimes there could be specific business units and user groups attached to that that you'll be serving to and all of them will have different needs and different capabilities that they want to see on the product and and they would like to know when something is completed so product roadmap should ideally communicate very clearly your product vision strategy and goal that you want to achieve and this document should have all of that very clearly with a clear timing timeline time frames and also communicate some sort of a commitment to these groups because they are interested to know what does this roadmap look like and what will I get in that time frame or time period from this product and what is the value add and how can I prepare for that from my side because there is always an activity post live that a lot of business units have to spend their effort on to make this product successful because I call it like an end to end life product lifecycle where it does not end in the moment you ship the real value drop happens when somebody starts consuming it and that's the real value of that product so you really need to understand end to end what is that product lifecycle and if you're mapping this roadmap you need to understand when does the product ship and when does it have a value drop so that you can help different business units so yeah so this is the part of why you why do we need roadmaps and the next interesting question is who is responsible for product roadmap of course we need to have one person who's accountable for the product roadmap and I assume in every organization that's going to be product manager and he or she is basically responsible for the end to end delivery of the product roadmap and also owning the items that are in the product roadmap which means that they know what they are showing on the roadmap and they are accountable in terms of delivering that and I usually feel that roadmap in some times or in some cases I've created an isolation which means that you create something along with just with yourself and you sometimes communicate it to your engineering teams and other business units or maybe you do an initial interaction and then you you come up with something but then the ideal scenario is I call it like an inclusive roadmap creation what is an inclusive roadmap creation you need to have your stakeholders engineering I mean I would say engineering team is also part of your stakeholder team but all the stakeholders as a part of the roadmap activity and you need to understand what is like the what are their short term goals and what are they trying to achieve in the next quarter or the year and based on that what is like your product vision and goal does it align to that and can we do something to make them successful in their areas of work and then take that into our roadmap so I call this as an inclusive roadmap planning you need to really sit with all these stakeholders and understand what do you really want to achieve and you really need to map it out in your roadmap and this also means to involve like cross functional teams in your area so if you are like a product part of the larger business unit and they have different product running across the same portfolio you need to collaborate with all these product managers to understand how what will be the dependency and another thing is mapping stakeholders and one thing that you will see in product management is there is never a permanent stakeholder ship you will always have new stakeholders in you will always have like new business opportunities through which there will be additional stakeholders so there will always be changing needs and you need to really know your stakeholders well and you need to know what is their stake because that will really help out you to understand how which things can can basically be prioritized of course priority is a different topic but you really need to know what is like immediate opportunities versus future opportunities and these stakeholders can help you understand that and other thing that you also need to take into account is the third party integrations because sometimes your product can depend on external products or technologies that are supporting your product and you need to really understand how the product operates and in every initiative that you want to plan out you need to also think that third party integration in the perspective how that will have an impact and and you need to also include them and the part of the road mapping process to understand how will that action item look like and support teams yes in every product there will be a support channel if you are a B2C or a B2P depending on the volume of business that your volume of business that your product is handling you will have certain amount or weightage of product feedback coming in which you use like a product feedback and and you basically put it back into the roadmap so this is the moment when you create your roadmap you also need to involve support teams and understand what are all the constant issues or problems or requests that are coming from users and basically use that back in into the into the product roadmap so that is a very valuable feedback loop and usually you get best ideas from there and organization policies so there are a lot of changes happening and it could be legal financial that comes through as a strategy from organization and you need to take all of those into account it could be any sort of compliance governance that you need to take into account that you need to have in your roadmap so you really need to think through end to end and create an inclusive roadmap how is this consumed by other teams so this is a very valuable information to understand so you have a roadmap ready you know what you want to do you have built it out but you really need to know like how is this being consumed before even this creation is complete and why I say that is because depending on the kind of organization you work you will have different business units consuming your roadmap for example if you work in in a star space organization you will work very closely with sales and marketing and and also leadership and if you work in a V2C company you will have if you work in V2C product you will work a lot with support in customer success team you will have also like marketing and finance very closely attached to it because it's a large online business so there can be changing needs in the market in terms of financial pricing and so and so and if you're working in in a product that is very focused on services and and basically you need to have a different group which is responsible so it totally depends on what product you work you will identify who are on the business units who are impacted by that and that's very crucial to understand you really need to map out who are your stakeholders and they can be part of any of these groups they could be part of support team and engineering team is for default and leadership sales marketing legal finance and you need and and how do they consume it so for example a customer service team they need to be aware of when a critical feature will be done for example if you take an e-commerce company and they find out that in check out things don't add up and in the right way or offer does not apply correctly a customer will come with a mindset to get the 50% off and if the 50% off is not applying while the sale is on then that's a problem it gets supported and this is something the customer service needs to know by what time it will be fixed or when it will be done so that they can manage the customer expectation otherwise they will basically lose all of the business for that particular time frame so it's very important for for constant communication to this this channel and engineering team so engineering team for example is is also a consumer of your roadmap and of course they're also contributing and a major contributor and why they how do they consume it so when when they look at the road map they really start picturing okay what is like this product and and they start drawing some sort of like high level technical framework in their head when they look at it and and one of the things that they really want to understand when they look at the roadmap is why do I need to do this why do I get why do I need need this particular feature to be done what is the value and when they know that when they know that this value is going to be for a for short term or long term that we see that there is a great value because we can on board new set of customers or new user groups then they will really think in the perspective of like what is the solution that they're offering and is that scalable and also ensuring that it can be something that can be used across different user groups so they will really try to understand why do we do this and and your roadmap need to communicate that and for leadership and they look at this roadmap for them they are really expecting on a strategic level okay what is this going to help us achieve as a business as a as a business strategy so in in organization you have like a very big strategy that that basically kind of splits across different business units and when the leadership is looking at the roadmap for them when they look at it they really need to understand what is the business value and your roadmap need to communicate that and for them it should be an easy takeaway okay this is the the business value drop and we are going to get at the end of Q1 or Q2 and they will basically look back into their strategy or organizational vision on what they wanted to achieve and for sales for example what does sales look for sales really is interested to know the features or the functions that will get achieved in a particular timeline and sometimes this can be a deal breaker for them if that doesn't get completed so for them it's really really important to understand what is going to be ready within the given time frame and they would also give that impact analysis back to product teams and they would say that by doing this feature before or after this will have this this effect or that effect so the roadmap creation process should already consist of sales if you're working very closely with them on on any sort of SaaS solutions or anything but basically the sales organization has a great impact in some of the deals prospective customers that they have in pipeline so these things will get affected if and also customer retention because some customers might be waiting for a particular feature for a very long time and sometimes if that is not completed their disappointments can basically double and and they would basically not be retainable so it's very important for sales to really understand how to really map the feature with the product group and another example is marketing this is also very crucial because if you're working in a product that's like focusing on on common like a B2C product you need to really have like a go to market strategy for everything you launch and marketing is very valuable for that and they know how to properly communicate the value of a change and I think that is something either for an internal change there's a change management team or for an external product there is like a marketing team who helps out but this is super valuable to take into account when you create product programs so that you can indicate at which moment in your product rollout you need to take help from marketing to get that ready so that at the time of the launch they are also ready from their perspective to help you launch this product in the market in the right way and legal so a product I would say legal and finance is more like a reactive approach it's not something that they are part of the road mapping process but as a product manager you need to think already if there are any legal or financial implications of any changes that you make in product so you need to like ensure you're circling back with these groups to ensure there is no potential risk on your product so the rest of the groups are basically proactively involving with you but these two are more like for the product manager to take a lead and ensure that there is legal finance kind of like compliance governance any sort of security that you need to have in place in your product you need to discuss with these groups and the next thing I'm going to cover is on the on the types of roadmap and the types of roadmap is very crucial to understand what they are so the internal or the internal and external roadmap so one of the things that I've usually seen is you need to in some organizations or for some products you need to have an internal roadmap which is very specific to product and engineering team and there is an external roadmap which will communicate like your value drops in different moment what is like the go-to market that you need to have how can you combine with different business units to make that happen kind of a complete release plan that you need to make and that's something that would collaborate multiple business units and that's something crucial to understand from a product standpoint from in in a product manager position whether something that's needed for your product and if it's needed you need to prepare two versions of your product roadmap which will basically focus on internal stakeholders versus external stakeholders and the next one is the strategic roadmap so strategic roadmap is basically deals with very very high level details and market state so you really like try to understand okay this is your product how does it fit into terms of like kind of a market fit and you come up with some real vague ideas or a long shot or a moonshot that you want to take and you basically make like a strategic roadmap and you also ensure that there are some execution plan towards that so this is very high level and it is also like a visionary it outlines your vision of the product so this is something that you can work with your leadership team and usually leadership team does have a strategic roadmap and this kind of disseminates to multiple product units or business units and products to achieve that so this is being maintained by leadership team and some of the other way along with the business course and a portfolio roadmap is something that basically is like I would say like an complete business portfolio has like all the products or tools attached to it and how is that managed and end to end how is it meeting their business course and this is also very valuable in some organizational structure the portfolio of products managed by a lead or a product director and they ensure that the high level strategy of that portfolio is disseminated to multiple product managers and they basically take that into account and ensure there is a cross functional collaboration to execute and complete that delivery so this product portfolio roadmap is super valuable when somebody has like a complete business portfolio dependency and it's disseminated across different products or capabilities so this is very useful in that way and epic roadmap is basically like epic or initiative is a kind of same so epic roadmap is like a group of features or stories basically that can be contributing to one single goal and that needs to be done and this is something super useful in case of like for engineering team where a product manager creates an epic roadmap and ensures they understand okay this is like a timeline that you want to follow so mostly typically I would say product managers are working in this format so they really go into this level and feature roadmap is in the case where you're really like focusing on some of the crucial features so sometimes you would see like the product managers are combining feature and epic roadmap and making it into one roadmap and indicate what are all the epics and features that they're expecting a certain quarter or a year that for their product so that that's the kind of roadmap but it can be also like a separate type of roadmap by itself and the release roadmap is like I would call it like something that you want to do in a particular time frame which can be longer than what you think for really achieving that product goal so it could be like a nine month timeline before you can achieve that so release roadmap is really to ensure that you have all of that things taken into account so it will have like epic features any sort of process changes from different business units and and go to marketing go to market strategy for marketing maybe some sort of sales campaigns that that needs to happen or marketing campaigns that need to happen that release will consist of everything that happens end to end for that product launch to be successful so it's it's really like an end to end roadmap that covers everything across multiple business units so these are the types of roadmap that are that are usually used by a product manager or product leadership and how to build a roadmap and now that you have all the context of what why and how how is that being consumed and so so one of the things really actionable so I'm going into real actions of what you need to do if you have a paper if you take it if you take the paper and if you write down okay now you have a product and product vision and strategy now and you also know your stakeholders versus users versus customers because all of these three things can sometimes be different as well and you also need to define a short term goal and long term goal which basically is like the goals that we talked about and breaking the goals down into actual initiatives which means actionable initiative so you know that this is your goal but there can be several initiatives to make that successful so you really need to break that down into several initiatives so if you are really trying to form a roadmap this is like a typical steps of how you want to do it and then once this is done you can also see based on what you have broken down for your product to be successful let's say you have a new product and you want to make it like so it's not possible that you can go in one in in one month you can be live with something unless you have like a capacity to do that but then for that to be happening you need to know like the set of initiatives that will go into it so you really need to understand okay what is like what are all the initiatives for the short term that will make it successful and you can either plan it in sort of increments or you can plan it in sort of a release format which means you know by end of this timeline this goal will be achieved with these initiatives or features in line and at the end of this this is the value drop or you can even say the first value drop is at this second value drop is at that so the users will already have a pilot and they can keep having more better experience at every increment so it depends on how you how you plan it and create epics containing actionable items so initiatives as I told you it can again be larger scheme of things you need to have epics basically another level of detail going into and having like a group of features or group of stories attached to it and of course you need to also create features so all of these work has to be done by product managers so not just until five so you need to create epics you need to create features you need to take the help of the stakeholders engineering team whosoever you need but you need to create epics and features in somewhere with the tools that you're offered in your organization and with that in place you can now start to visualize the three to five years and one year expanded timeline and I would say looks something broadly like this this is not like a very accurate picture I have something as an example that I can show you but basically you can have a sort of expanded view on how the roadmap looks like and you also need to take into other channel requests so what do I mean by other channel requests there are multiple business units and stakeholders that we already saw who are dependent on your product so they'll have different channels in which they will require they will request new feature or functions that you have not taken into account in your initial road mapping process so this will keep coming in you need to have all of that ideas logged in somewhere and you need to show them how that is making through into your roadmap or at least you need to let them know it's not possible to do because you have enough in your plate and you don't have the the capacity to do it and it is something then as a as a whole team you will have to sit and you have to really bring strong on what what are the pros and cons of doing it and not doing it so I think that's something you will definitely do as a product manager you will constantly keep bringing in and use some sort of priority matrix different priority techniques to ensure that right things get into the roadmap and you also take that into account because you can't have like a perfect roadmap that doesn't get changed at all there will always be some changes and you have to be adaptable to the changing needs so that is something that you want to take into account and you can create like a wish list or idea backlog or whatever where people can throw in ideas and it is your beauty as product manager to continuously review that and I usually do something like this it's called now next later roadmap so when I have no clue about what I have to do and I know of course like the product vision strategy goal but I really don't know like what do we really need like for the product and how would we start like you need to start somewhere right and you have a lot of features lot of functions that you have to deliver but you can only do something with the with the capacity you have so you need to really think through okay what is the value are who are you targeting who's the user group and what does it really need like now like literally in one month so that I would put it in now and then next is like something that I know immediately appending action as a as a result of this you would need this this this this so that particular thing goes in the next and whatever I'm unsure whatever I I don't know like if it will really add value or not based on the circumstance that I'm sitting in now it will only be clear or evident in the near future that those things will be valuable yes it's it's something that's indicated by difference take hold of growth that's super valuable nice to have amazing feature that I saw in the competitors all of this will come through so you need to really like know whether that's something really really valuable or it's something you want to take it for the later so I would say this is some sort of a scheme that I follow to just place okay these are all like features functions epics whatever and what can I do in the short term long term and real long term so this is something like but this is also a roadmap technique used by some of the product teams in in different parts of the globe where you have like a new product and and you don't have like a real long strategy and investment so sometimes this can be super helpful when you're working in a in a damn new idea or productive and that is something that you're trying to pilot or create like a proof of concept this can be super useful and this is an agile roadmap example of course you'll see a lot of masked image to master items but what I have tried to do is if you look there is like a time frame of course that you are that you're seeing on the top so you have different time frames in which you're you're you're organizing this and then you have like different elements like for example these are initiatives and these are product features and functions and these are technology features or functions and business value drop so these are basically like product features functions and initiatives and that will be listed here based on timeline and all of that and then the business value drop is okay at the end of this what is the value drop that that will be delivered and also this is also something super useful I also indicate like the discovery that goes on from product and business side and why because the the team will also know that we are not just working on just this but we are also doing some research on future items in this particular time frame so they they can already know what the future looks like for this product and this is something either they can contribute to a near-term goal or they can also be for real long term so depending on what value drop is planned sometimes I I work together with business or business teams or even I initiate some of the product capability research myself to do that and basically build on discovery for the for the roadmap so this is an example of a agile roadmap version but there are also goal oriented roadmap I've created in my previous roles where I say that if you're working in an e-commerce product you basically say that you have customer retention you have technology innovations and you have different business goals and then you can also put different features and functions epics or related to that goals and how would you achieve and again in that you will indicate the value drop at the end of that particular feature or function what will be the value drop so sometimes technology innovation or the business goal about customer engagement can go together to contribute one business value drop so it's about how you organize you really need to know what your product does what is your business goal what is your business unit needs based on that you need to create the roadmap because what I have created is very specific to my product needs but you really need to understand what your product needs and create according to that so if you're working purely in the initiative level of business goals business goal and then you need to do that and if I am working for example I work in two different products or three different products then I create like a portfolio level roadmap which basically indicates in that portfolio basically how the different products or the product modules represent these goals that are that are needed to be achieved so you really need to understand what you're you're working in and some other tools to consider in the market and I am a big fan of Hexcel and PowerPoint and I think most of you or most of the leadership team will not agree that because there is a more a drive for structured behavior of how we do the road maps and especially in the organizational level there is a drive to use a common tool across different teams so they get a long-term strategy attached to it and they understand how different products are contributing so I would say the tools between two and two to seven are really helpful for organizational point of view and Hexcel and PowerPoint is like the baby of every product manager who can who can create road maps just in those and and make it very visually beautiful in PowerPoint and ensure that's that's done but if you still feel apart from these I think a lot of these product I have used myself in that are available like our product board product plan all of these have real good capabilities as well you can share also with different business units and they can see what is happening even if things more around it automatically generates email to the business unit contacts who are following that so it's it's super valuable but it's also a lot of work so yes so I would say that there are pros and cons of using everything so you need to really understand what is your nature of business what is your nature of product and how will it be useful by using some of these tools you really need to do some research and then basically adopt any of the tools so that was it and I want to thank you again for joining this session and yeah I wish you all very good evening or good afternoon or good morning and have a nice day thank you


So in this video, we're going to look at a very particular kind of equilibrium, which is the equilibrium that's set up when something dissolves in water, specifically when ionic compounds or salts dissolve in water. So up until now we've been talking about equilibria and how they are defined by the equilibrium constant, KEQ. When we specifically talk about things dissolving, we give the equilibrium constant a special name. It's called KSP and the SP stands for solubility product. So this is specifically for situations where you've got something dissolving and precipitating in solution. So here's an example. We've got potassium carbonate and we've put some of that into water and the forward reaction in this equilibrium is that the solid is dissolving into aqueous ions, which are free in solution. So forward reaction is dissolving and the reverse reaction is that the free ions in solution are re-precipitating as the solid. So the reverse reaction is precipitating. Bear in mind that this is what we would tend to call a physical equilibrium. It's not actually a chemical reaction. We're not producing any new compounds. We're just moving between the solid state and the aqueous state. But it is nevertheless a true equilibrium. Okay, to write the equilibrium expression for a solubility equilibrium, you do it exactly the same way as you do for any other equilibrium. But the thing to remember is that in this kind of equilibrium, the reactant is always solid. It's the salt that's dissolving. And because of this rule that we have, that we ignore the solids and pure liquids, it doesn't appear in the equilibrium expression. So for this particular one we've got Ksp, solubility product instead of Keq. It's exactly the same thing. We're just giving it a different name to indicate that it's this particular kind of equilibrium. So we've got Ksp equals and it's products over reactant. So our products are the potassium ion here and it has a stoichiometric coefficient of 2, so we raise it to the power of 2. And the carbonate ion, concentration of the carbonate ion, our reactants of course are the solid and so they get ignored. So that's our equilibrium expression.