Hello everyone, and welcome to this first webinar in the Baby Steps webinar series, The Heart of a Good Story is You. I'm Ellie Bizdeekian, and joining us here today we're very excited to have Matthew Rowe from Dirty Rubber to discuss a little bit more about why storytelling and why it's so important for you as a storyteller to be empowered in particular ways to capture and show your organization's mission in practice. Here at TechSoup we believe that storytelling not only builds but is also the currency of community. These images are the winning photo submissions of TechSoup's annual digital storytelling competition where for the last four years we've been able to cultivate a community of nonprofits and storytellers that are now out there contributing rich content to the various landscapes and communities they touch. What do you think about when you see these images? Where do you go? What emotions do you feel? Understanding the heart of a good story leads to better content, better visibility, visibility of your message and of the work that you're doing in the field. I'm really very excited to be discussing all of these really exciting concepts coming up in a few minutes. But before I get ahead of myself, I did just want to back up and take a moment to acknowledge our webinar sponsor, ReadyTalk, whose platform makes all of our webinars possible. If you are connected to audio by phone, please note that all lines are muted. So if you have a question or comment, please share those with us in that lower left hand chat box window where Becky will be capturing your questions as we go along. If you lose your connection at all today, don't worry. You can simply reconnect using the confirmation email that was sent to you before this event or dial the number that Becky will chat out right now. This webinar is being recorded and will be sent out to all of you later today with the slides and all of the resources and links we discussed. If you hear something worth sharing on this webinar today, tweet it out at TechSoup or at Dirty Robber using the hashtag Baby Steps Comp. Again, I'm Ali Bazdikian. I'm an Interactive Events and Video Producer here at TechSoup Global where I work with Becky Wiegand on chat to program educational events like this and help produce our digital content. I've been at TechSoup for two years and before this I got my start in nonprofit communications as a fellow at Mother Jones Magazine here in San Francisco having studied broadcast journalism at the University. Also on the call today, we are so thrilled to have the talented Matthew Rowe. Matt, it's really great to have you with us today. I'm very excited to be here. I was hoping maybe you can start off by telling us a little bit more about yourself and what you do at Dirty Robber, but then we'll get more into what we're all working towards with the Baby Steps Campaign for Early Childhood Education. We'll discuss your own process of story making with the banner film for the campaign and then really get into the why of storytelling. Matt, do you want to take it away? Absolutely. My role at Dirty Robber is I am a junior creative director which is essentially a fancy term to mean I write. What we do at Dirty Robber is a company that specializes in short form content. That shows we do branded content. We do short films. We were actually nominated for an Oscar this year for a short film that we did called The Scottish Boys which is set in Afghanistan. My role at Dirty Robber is to generate ideas with the other creators and directors who execute on their ideas to develop scripts, to develop pitch packets, anything that goes into the creation of one of our projects. So that's my role at Dirty Robber. What we've done is this Baby Steps competition that Ali mentioned just a second ago. We have done in partnership with Further by Design, the Kellogg's Foundation, the Bay Area Council, and TechSoup. And the petition is about early childhood development which is the age for children between 0 and 5 that specifically is the largest period of growth that we go through as people. We love particular period of time. The competition. Hey Matt, if I could just jump in for a brief moment. We're losing you on the audio a little bit. I think you're going in and out. Okay. I'm on my landline so I'm not sure what to do. Let me see if this helps at all. Is this any better? It sounded a little bit better briefly but keep talking. Okay. Sorry about that. If it keeps happening let me know and I will simply repeat what I'm saying. So the competition is designed to have parents, educators, caregivers, family members to film themselves interacting with their child or with their student or with their family member and showing us how they interact with their child in a unique and specific way that helps engage the child. What we wanted to do with the video was essentially raise awareness. Raise awareness of early childhood development. Raise awareness of it as a concept and most importantly raise awareness of how critical it can be in helping our children grow to be healthy and successful adults. We actually have the video here.  It's only two minutes long. What I think is a good idea here is if we watch the video and then I will speak about the sort of generation of the video, about how we developed it, how we came to this place and sort of maybe walk through the process that we want through to get to this video. So I'm going to go ahead and load that up now. And like I say, it will take about two minutes to play. So just give it a watch and then we'll talk about it right after. Remember, but there was a time you couldn't walk. Just trying to was an adventure. Was a step you can't remember, but someone helped you.  This winter, Invest Early invites parents, families, caregivers and educators nationwide to answer one question. This is what I do with my child. What do you do with yours? The Baby Steps Competition asks you to submit videos that capture a snapshot of how we care for children during the first five years of their lives. For parents and families, we're looking for short videos taken by iPhone or by camera, whatever you have that's able to capture the simple everyday things you do with your child or family member. For care providers and teachers, we want to help you generate videos by capturing all the creative things you do to inspire your students. Whether it's reading, singing, playing or coloring, the Baby Steps Competition will be running from December 2nd to February 2nd and will be recognizing winners based on four criteria. Their emotional value, their educational value, the creativity of the activity and the quality of the video. Go to babystepscompetition.com to learn more about how to enter and see why we believe the first five years of a child's life are vital to investing. The banner video for the competition, the announcement video if you like for the competition and its base and how to enter and all that sort of critical information. So what I'd like to do now as I said is maybe talk about the process of how we arrived at that video. So one of the very first things to bear in mind when crafting a story is that very often you are not crafting your own story. And by that I mean you are working with and for other people. And very often what you are dealing with is you're dealing with multiple bosses for want of a better phrase. You're working with various groups who all have information, all have a vested interest in the story or in the project itself. And so one of your very, very first jobs as the crafter of the story is to identify what needs to be said. And I know that that may be slightly redundant, but when you are dealing with multiple people and multiple groups it's really, really the critical first step to get everybody on the same page to agree to what the story is that you're telling. Because without that you end up going around in circles. It's very hard to make sure that everybody is being represented. It's very hard to take all this information and turn it into a compelling and emotionally engaging story. So the very first step, once you assess the lay of the land with the various elements involved, this is literally the most critical step. You have to identify a clarity of purpose, right? Without sounding too much like it's marketing you essentially have to identify what it is that your story is selling, right? What is the concept? What is the message? What is the point of the story being told? So with the baby steps competition, the video that you guys just watched in particular, what we were dealing with in early childhood development is an incredibly complex philosophy. It is a very broad, very comprehensive way of looking at how to deal with children at that age. And so the initial conversations that we had with the various partners with the various elements, there was a lot of discussion about what parts of early childhood development are we going to focus on, how are we going to best communicate the complexity of the philosophy and the worry there is that you get bogged down in trying to relate too much information and never ever getting people engaged. So one of the very first steps that we as a team took that was such a huge step for us to be able to make that video is we agreed upon a single purpose of the video. It wasn't necessarily to jump into the various sort of mechanisms of early childhood development to discuss in detail or in length some of the issues of it because you couldn't make too many videos. What we wanted to do was raise awareness of early childhood development as a concept to the general public because it's easy to forget when you're embroiled in a story, when you're dealing with a particular thing that very often by the time you get to writing or crafting the story, you have a pretty good understanding of it but when you came into the project you probably didn't and you've got to remember that most of the people that will be watching your story or engaging with your story, they don't have that, they're like you when you first started working on the project, they don't necessarily have the breadth of information that you do now. So it was one of the great moments for us when we were developing this video is when we all came to the realization that if we are simply trying to raise awareness of the importance of early childhood development that as a single point of focus allows us to do so much more than trying to incorporate multiple different purposes for one of a better phrase. So the very first thing we did was clarity of purpose. Now once you have your clarity of purpose of your story, what is the story supposed to do? It allows you to look at who you want to watch the story because again when trying to craft a story that people are going to watch knowing the kind of people that are going to watch it is critical to how you end up writing the story. So when we realized that we were trying to raise awareness of what early childhood development was, it was a pretty easy jump to go from that to parents, to educators, to caregivers, to family members because these are the people that are not only going to care the most about early childhood development but ultimately are the very people responsible for early childhood development. So once we have the purpose to raise awareness, finding our audience became that much easier. Now before we even put pen to paper on writing our story, we have two of the three key criteria maps out. We know what we are trying to do and we know who we are going to try and tell our story to. So once you have got those two elements locked in, the third element and this is the big one for me is the simplicity of the story. It can become very easy to get wrapped up in trying to be clever with how you communicate your story, with how you tell your message. And very often you can find yourself, especially I find when you first start writing stories or crafting messages, it's so, so easy to get caught up in how clever you can be or how unique a way you can tell the story. That's fine but none of that matters unless your story itself, the nuts and bolts of the story is really, really simple to follow. So if we look at the banner video that we just watched, it's broken essentially into two components. The first, so 55 seconds to a minute, tells the story of a child walking towards camera. It is the simplest story you could imagine. So to give you a genesis of how we got to that point, the simplicity of that, once we had the clarity of purpose, we wanted to raise awareness of what early childhood development is and how it impacted what it can be, once we knew who we wanted to watch this video who we wanted to engage this video with and ultimately who we wanted to have entered the competition, developing a story that would capitalize on those two things became a back simplicity because for us the competition, the Baby Steps competition is about, sorry, I'm going to call up, early childhood development is about helping children from zero to five. You are talking about taking the very first step in nurturing and growing a child, right? And so with that imagery and with that language and with that sort of discussion going on amongst the creative group and coming to the conclusion that the competition is called the Baby Steps competition, it occurred to us that literally showing a child taking their very first Baby Step, the simplicity of that would be a really great way of introducing this much larger concept of early childhood development.  The reason why that is so important for us is because the simpler the story, the more you allow the emotion of the story, the more you allow the purpose of the story to become the dominant factor.  By going that route, by making it that simple it becomes from my money that much more engaging. Yeah Matt, what you said right there I think is really powerful. Oftentimes as storytellers you need to know when to move out of the way of the story. I think that is a really powerful concept. Absolutely and it is very much a learned skill. It is one of those things that you have to trust. At some juncture you have to trust the work that you have done, the story that you have developed and obviously you almost never develop these things in the vacuum, you are working with other people. So the tune of people that have developed this idea that are executing this idea at some juncture you have to trust that is correct. Once you get to that place, you step out of the way and you allow the story to unfold I think you end up almost always with the strongest examples of storytelling. So I just want to recap ever so quickly for me the three critical areas of storytelling to the short forms of storytelling is you have to identify a clarity of purpose. You are going to be working with multiple groups, multiple people, everybody bringing their own ideas and opinions to the table and as the sort of craft of the story your very very first job is to disseminate all those various voices and help guide them into a single focus voice. This is the goal of our story. Once you have done that it becomes so much simpler then to look at that goal, what is our goal? If our goal is in our case to raise awareness finding the audience becomes so much simpler. Now we have our goal, raise awareness. We find the audience with people we want to be aware of the topic. In this case it was educators, parents, caregivers. But whatever story you'd be working on once you have the clarity you find the audience. Now once those two things are locked in the next next step, and this is the biggest step, the hardest step and ultimately the most important step, you have to allow the story a level of simplicity. That doesn't mean you can't be innovative in the way you tell the story. I'm going to talk about a few other commercials that I haven't, I didn't write sadly but are very successful commercials that are innovative whilst telling simple stories. You can be innovative in your approach and often that will come in partnership with, you know, if you're making a video, you can come in partnership with the director, if you are writing a story with the editor. How you tell your story is a separate question. But the story itself, the more successful stories are the ones that are simple, that allow the story to be the prominent factor. So those for me are the three key areas of telling particularly short form stories and are certainly the rules that we use when developing the banner video for the Baby Steps competition. I'm going to talk about right now a pretty unique part of the experience that I just went through on the Baby Steps competition and it sort of reinforces why it's important to have those two steps I just talked about. When we were shooting this video we were obviously working with a lot of children. You saw that there were, you know, up to 15 to 20 children that we filmed for that spot. I don't know how many of you are parents or interact daily with children but from zero to five children can be unpredictable shall we say. And obviously when you're working on a set with a finite amount of time and a very clear goal in mind about what you want to achieve it can be a little more racking when, you know, the children turn up because they're going to do whatever they're going to do. And that's great and that's what you want. You want that spontaneity. You want that joy of life that only a child brings to you. So again one of the reasons why we were so rigid about simplicity of story, about making sure that we didn't get too clever with what we were trying to do was that meant that when the children came and we were filming them and they were doing what they were doing, when they ended up doing whatever it is that they wanted to do because they're little children and they're going to do what they're going to do, it was okay because we had set the parameters up so that no matter what the child did, if the child walked towards camera, great. If the child couldn't walk towards camera he could only stumble, great. If the child couldn't walk at all but only crawled, that's fine as well. The main thing is that we had created the parameters that allowed us to stay very focused on telling a simple story and that whatever the child gave us would still work within those parameters. That was just a very unique experience. They say have a work with pets and children. I think they only have a work with pets and children and I find it to be the most fun you can have. So I think they're lying. But it can be a little bit unpredictable and so again the more simple the story, the more focused you are going into the execution of the story, the more focused you are on what you're trying to do, on who you're trying to reach and how simple you can make it when inevitably things arise. And obviously for this particular video it was children but if you are working on a different story or if you are making a commercial or something, there are always going to be exact moments that you can't possibly prepare for. And that's why it's so critical, so, so, so critical to have those three things locked in, quality of purpose, know your audience, simple story. Those three things will allow you to surf over any waves that come unexpectedly. So I want to move away from the video, the baby steps competition because obviously that's a very specific focus. And I want to sort of talk a little more broadly about storytelling and about how to do successful storytelling. We are obviously living in an era where the web is becoming essentially our go-to source for almost all information. There's more and more TV and film being directed towards the web. Obviously Netflix is exploding with its own content. Hulu, Amazon Instant Video is doing their own content. The web is becoming sort of where we live for story. One of the things that I found very interesting over the last few years, and obviously because where I work we sort of specialize on short form content, what I've noticed is that traditional commercials are buying.  More and more what you're seeing is you're seeing minute-long commercials or sometimes 90-second, two-minute long commercials. I watched the Super Bowl this year and I was stunned to see how many of the commercials from the Super Bowl ran longer than a minute. What we're seeing is we're seeing a move towards instead of simple 30-second commercials to introduce the product, sell the product and move on, you're seeing these essentially branded content spots where the commercial is designed at creating an emotional engagement with the audience to take us on a two-minute journey to tell a two-minute story and to give us a satisfying ending. I find that to be really very interesting. I'm going to talk about three commercials ever so quickly that I think are really, really important because one of the questions that we sort of deal with when telling stories is what does a good story look like? How do you tell when you've got a good story? And the reality is that it's very, very hard to figure that out. And often you don't know until it's finished and people are responding to it whether or not you've done a good job or whether or not it's a good story. But one of the things that I find very interesting is, and I think this is important for where we are in terms of working with not-for-profits and working with sort of non-traditional storytelling entities, is that the most successful commercials over the last few years, and I think commercials, it's wrong to call them commercials, the most successful branded content that I have seen over the last few years have had nothing to do with production value, they've had nothing to do with how much things cost, they have nothing to do with anything of that nature which historically have been sort of benchmarks of good storytelling. What we're seeing more and more of these short-form branded content is how – I don't want to sort of harp on about the three things I talked about earlier – how clear the messaging is, how specifically targeted to an audience they are, and how simple the stories are. Because the other thing about the web is that it's a direct link between you, the user, and the interface. So marketing can be targeted much stronger than towards you specifically as opposed to on a television show where they – if you watch a cop detective show, the commercials are very often geared at sort of males 18 to 35 because that's the largest demographic to watch shows, cop shows or whatever, you're seeing nine more and more because it's you directly interfacing with your own internet and it has a memory of what you've watched, the commercials are getting far more specific and far more synced to you. So I'm going to talk about three spots that I think are incredibly successful storytelling branded content. The first one is a spot called Embrace Life. There's a link there for you guys to look at. And I do really strongly suggest that if you have a few minutes when we're done, you go and watch these spots. Embrace Life was a PSA that was built by a company in England. They were approached by a group called the Sussex Safer Road Society and they basically said, we want you to make a PSA on why it's important to wear safety belts. But we don't want you to make a PSA because PSAs never work. We want you to do something completely different. And what follows when you watch it? And I'm reluctant to talk about this one in particular because giving away anything in the spot will ruin the experience. But what follows is 90 seconds of spell binding storytelling. But again, it comes from the three very simple principles. They are very clear on their purpose. They want you to know why it's important to wear safety belts. They have a very specific audience that they are geared towards which is ultimately everybody. And I know that might sound counter-intuitive but there is a simplicity to, and this is the final point I'm going to get to, there is a simplicity to everything that they're trying to do that allows it to be so universal. So they have a very specific goal, why you should wear safety belts. They have a very specific audience, everybody, and the story they tell is very simple. It is about a man playing with his family and he is driving and then an unexpected twist happens. And the reason why this one is what I started with is because having worked in production, having done stories at a low budget, I can tell you that this spot was done for hardly any money at all. It costs next to nothing and yet it is an incredibly compelling, emotive, brilliant piece of storytelling. And it just further proves that if you have a really clear goal in mind you tell a very simple story and you execute it well that you can really, really affect change. Again, I'm really reluctant to talk about this one because it really is such a great watch and I cannot recommend strongly that you watch it. It's absolutely brilliant. You can see that it won a Camelion which is a big award for advertising. It is a very big hit. The second spot I want to talk about which I'm sure is probably far more familiar to a lot of you is the Deer Sophie spots that were run by Google and Gmail. And these spots, the concept is really very, very simple. It's a matter of father whose wife is just about to give birth and he opens up a Gmail account for his Deer Sophie at Gmail.com and he writes her an email every day or every other day until she turns 18 and it charts the growth from the adorable child that you see on the screen to when she's a 16 or 17 year old girl. And this one is interesting because this is not a cheap commercial. It's not an expensive commercial. It's somewhere in between. And it's again, it's an incredibly effective branded content spot. It's an incredibly effective story because it does again the three things. It is a very clear purpose. They want to show you the power, the stability, the lasting power of Gmail, of Google. They want to show you how the cutting edge of technological involvement in our lives. It's a really simple concept that they utilize brilliantly. Again, the audience is very clear. It's directed at parents, it's directed at millennials, sort of 18 to 35 year olds who are either about to start a family or thinking about having a family. And the story is incredibly simple. Let's just simply show a child getting older. What's incredible about this spot and also about the embraced life spot is the innovative way they do it.  That's not necessarily that interesting or that clever. If I can say what I'm going to do is do it through the prism of my email capacity, of my involvement with Google and Gmail, all that it has to it. Well, now it's elevated slightly. It's intriguing. It's an innovative way of telling the story. It's simple. It's still a priority of purpose. It's still going incredibly specific audience. But it is innovative in its approach. The third spot I want to talk about and this is the top end. This spot costs lots and lots and lots of money. I've got it here at the Olympic Moms. It's actually Thank You Moms. It's the name of the spot. It is run as you can tell during the 2012 Olympics by P&G. It's a brilliant spot about showing four or five different children from being very young. One of them wants to be a runner. One of them wants to be a swimmer. One wants to be a volleyball player. One's a gymnast. And it just shows you the different children and how their moms, every step of their lives, they wake them up early in the morning. They make them breakfast. They take them to their first practice. When they hurt themselves, they bandage them up. When they fall off the beam, they help them get back on top. They drive them to the various meetings. They help make their costumes.  And of course the finale is these four or five kids now at the London Olympics winning their events and essentially the backbone to that success is their mom. It is, again, an unbelievably successful story. It is, again, clarity of purpose. They knew exactly what they wanted to do. They wanted to say thank you to their moms. Like literally that's the title of the spot. That's what the spot's about. It couldn't be clearer. Now obviously from the clarity of purpose, who is your audience? Well that's pretty obvious. It's from moms. And the simplicity of the story, literally they're just showing moms helping their children. It's no different in terms of concept to the Baby Steps competition video. This is about parents helping their children. That's its goal. What's amazing, again, is the innovative approach that they take to achieving that goal which is this is where it gets Hollywood. They have lots of locations. It's set in Asia, it's set in Brazil, it's set in London. It's all over the world. They have beautifully shot footage. It's a very expensive spot. The reason why I wanted to show you these three branded content spots in particular is these are three incredibly powerful stories. In the question of what does a good story look like, these three spots look like good stories. They couldn't be more different if they tried. They couldn't cost different amounts of money if they tried. They couldn't have more different styles if they tried. What they all do share in common is they all know exactly what they're trying to do, who they're trying to reach, and they allow the story to be the dominant factor in an equation. That for me is proof in the pudding of how successful stories look. Successful stories look like that. For me it's one of those things where branded content is becoming more and more the norm I think for how we're going to receive a lot of the stories that we see. For me the way you make those stories successful is you have to engage your audience in a way that perhaps previously you didn't. Because if we are all moving much more towards a web-based interface with how we receive our stories, whilst they can focus those stories much closer to us as the user specifically, the issue that they are going to lie into is that the web is essentially an infinite space. Unlike television where there are parameters and checks and balances that if you are a brand or if you are a company you can essentially pay for your way onto television. The web is an open space that we have to use to dictate where we want to go. The reason why it brings that up is that in an infinite space finding an audience is incredibly difficult, incredibly difficult. And so whilst we look at these three spots and two of them are massively recognizable brands. You've got Google which is arguably the most recognizable brand in the world and P&G which is very, very famous. The very first spot, the Embraced Life Spot, is for a regional English safety belt PSA. It couldn't be less glamorous if it tried. But it is incredibly effective and became incredibly popular and became incredibly famous because it was so well done, because the story was so simple, because its clarity of purpose was so clear and because they knew exactly who they wanted to watch that spot. And I think that for me those three as a sort of sampling of the market, if you like, a great example of how good stories in this sort of branded content era are about not about cost or about main value, they're about connection. And I think that those are the three key elements, clarity of purpose, know your audience, and just the story that will help tell good stories. The final step that I want to talk about in terms of crafting a good story is the storyteller which is to say you. Very often you are going to be the lens through which the story is crafted. Now what do I mean by that? Essentially as I said earlier, you are very, very rarely writing a story for you, or very rarely are you writing a story in which you are the ultimate yes or no sort of power. Very often you are working with other creatives. You are almost always working for at least one other boss, often multiple bosses. And it's really, really important that you and your point of view, that you allow your point of view to essentially shape the story itself. Earlier I mentioned how once you have the simplicity of story locked in, you sort of have to get out of the way and allow the story to do what it's got to do. But before that you have to, another sort of thing that is very easy to do in the initial stages of crafting a message is to simply try and please everybody around you. If you are working for multiple directors, if you are working with different branchmen, your grant funders, if you are working with different people who are important in the process, very often you simply want to make sure that they are happy, that what they want is recognized. And obviously that's a very important step, but the reason why you are telling the story, why you are the person crafting the message is because you have a point of view. You have a message that you need to craft, and it is really, really important that you don't lose that. And that's true of anything that you write. It doesn't matter if you are writing a commercial, if you are writing a novel, if you are writing a movie, you have to remember that you are the lens through which this story is going to interact with the world. You essentially are the conduit for the story because without you it doesn't go anywhere. It simply exists as an idea on a page or in a useful, so you are the one who will turn it into a tangible, watchable, readable, engageable item. And so when I say that you are the lens, you shouldn't forget that.  What I'm saying is that you have to recognize when you have, you have to recognize when you know in your gut what the story needs to go, where it needs to go, how it needs to be constructed. Essentially what I'm trying to do here is reinforce in this process that you are an incredibly valuable part of it becoming a created, existing object. As a writer, it's very easy to, when things go well, you find that a writer is very often the very last person who is back. I speak from experience. And it's very easy to get lost behind if you're making a commercial, the director takes all the praise or the product itself gets, that's a great spot by Google. Nobody ever thinks, wow, who wrote that spot for Google? The reason why I sort of bring this up is because you have to recognize that as the conduit between the item that you are trying to sell, and I don't mean to be sort of marketing or advertising. No matter what you are doing, no matter if you're writing a script, a novel, a commercial, whatever you're writing, you are selling either a concept or a brand or a very specific object, but your job is to sell the story to the audience. And so it's really very, very important that you don't ever forget that, that you allow who you are and the experiences that you've had and the influences that you exert to shape the story. It's a really hard thing to do, it's a really hard thing to learn, but it's something that as you're going forward you shouldn't ever stop. You shouldn't ever lose sight of that. So that is sort of, for me that's sort of like an overview of how the process that we go through at Berthier Roberts used to craft these short form stories that we do. I think that pretty much covers the overview of it. So yeah, I feel like just to recap ever so quickly, I've said it a hundred times so I'm sure it's pretty logged in. Very first step, clarity of purpose. You've got to make sure that all the various interests are on the same page, that there is an agreement on what the message is going to be, on what the story is going to be, because once you've got that clarity it's really easy to find who it is who's going to watch these spots, who's going to read this novel, who's going to whatever it might be. Once you have the clarity of purpose in the audience in mind the next important step is the simplicity of the story. Do not allow the story to get complicated. You can tell it in an innovative way, but you can't allow the story itself to become too complicated, because when you do that you are robbing the story of its power.  Once you've got those three things, you have to sort of take a step back and allow the story to do its job. Before you do any of that, the very, very first thing is remember that you have to embrace that you are the lens through which this message is being crafted, that your point of view, your voice is critical to the success overall of how a story is shaped. Those are sort of like the big things for us. Thank you so much, Matt. That was really informative. You brought some really great examples of effective storytelling to the table today. Those of you in the audience, do you take the time to watch a few of those clips when you received the post-defined email later today? They are really good and very thought-provoking and heart-string tugging. That banner film, Matt, your team really did an amazing job with that. It's quite moving and really gets at the heart of what the Baby Steps campaign is all about. Now I'd like to speak quickly in the time we have left to why digital storytelling. Matt, as you started to get at it earlier, for me the most obvious answer is that we are visual creatures. And as we saw in the banner film, stories are moving. That's just how we experience and process life. How did social media become the goliath that is today? It's really simple. Photos and videos are extremely engaging, and people want to see them. As I mentioned before, stories are the currency of community. And really, any Instagram feed is testament to that. We follow people we don't know personally, but feel like we know them intimately. We photograph breakfast, road signs, sunsets, moments spent playing and learning with our children, championship moments. These are the things that really matter to us. So it's these moments that are sort of the time stamps of our lives that show we accomplish things in life. But as Matt pointed out, without a storyteller to make sense of those random moments, those moments are static. They are fixed in a moment in time. As a storyteller for your organization, your challenge is to capture and consider the many images around us and arrange them in an order that speaks to your audience to inspire others to get involved in your mission. Technology has really made it possible to capture and share many of those moments in an instant really, and oftentimes to a widespread and distributed audience. Many of us have gone mobile to capture and engage with the rest of the world. Nowadays, you don't necessarily need to put aside a huge budget or go all out to start telling stories. I mean, bless your heart, if you get to work with some of the best of the best like Matt and the Dirty Rubber team. But I mean, there are many positive reasons to work with professionals, but I do want to stress the idea of starting within reach. Just start somewhere by taking inventory of the technology at your disposal right now. If that's purchasing a few apps for your smartphone, think about putting aside a small budget for a handheld device or a flip camera. Just take a manageable baby step towards digital production. You can start by interviewing your community or donor members at your next conference using your smartphone. You can record technology events live and publish to YouTube directly with an app called YouTube Capture for example. There are many ways that you can start telling your own stories now. There are opportunities for storytelling everywhere all around us curating that and funneling it back to the community you serve ultimately fosters trust and mutual respect between funders, donors, board members, and community members. I would encourage you all to think about ways to transform content that you already produce whether those are case studies, data sets, maps, timelines, charts, transform those into opportunities for storytelling. Ask questions.  Capture clips at conferences and use them as assets on social media in your reports and proposals. Storytelling really is at the core of what we do. It should be incorporated into ways we communicate with each other on social media in the work that we are already producing as nonprofits, libraries, and charities. Storytelling really builds community and opens doors, opens opportunities for conversation, and really is a powerful medium. I would like to now open the floor for questions directed towards Matt or myself. If the audience has any questions at this time we will take it now. But I did want to go ahead and thank you all for joining us today, especially thanks to Matt for being an amazing presenter and to his team, as well as everyone else involved in making this webinar possible, especially our platform sponsor, ReadyTalk. We do have one question for you, Matt, before we wrap it up here today. The question is, what inexpensive equipment would you recommend for capturing stories outside of the few apps I mentioned or your smartphone? What's your go-to recommendation for inexpensive equipment? Are you talking about writing software, or are you talking about cameras? No, just camera, just for capturing the story specifically. Honestly, there is a camera called the 5V Canon camera. It is the industry standard sort of go-to low-budget camera. I can't remember exactly how much it costs, but the great thing about the 5V is that it is relatively inexpensive to purchase which is obviously critical, but it also works if you ever get lucky enough to have the money to render the fancy lenses. They all work on the 5V, but it's not necessary to have them. For me, if you're talking about, hey, what could I go and buy right now that I could then use right now to make something a 5V with 100% be my answer. That said, I've been looking at the specs of the new camera on the new iPhone, and I've got to say that the new iPhone camera is pretty spectacular as well. So I would say that those are the two sort of everyday objects that you could buy to really start capturing footage and start telling stories. Great. Thanks so much. Do you have any recommendations on apps in particular, or apps that you personally use to kind of capture and share quickly, small clips? You know, I don't have, what I use is there's an app called Snapseed which is a free app that has filters and allows you to basically do very simple Photoshop-esque things to your image. Snapseed also has a video component which the name is escaping me as I think about it, but there is a similar thing that you can add filters and color effects and stuff like that to your video clips. And it's a very, very involved app. Like you can literally pick specific parts of the frame that you want to be saturated and then another part to be desaturated and stuff like that. So it's a really great app. Great. In the last three minutes that we have, one last question, and that is really, how do nonprofits go out there and convince funders to provide support for storytelling in a way that shows dollars and cents, and that their project actually has benefit to the community? How do you make that pitch to a funder? Yeah, that's a great, that has a million dollar question. How do you get to somebody and get them to agree to fund something? For me, it's the simplest thing I can say to you honestly is it's about two things. There is no better way of getting people involved in whatever you're doing, getting an engaged audience and telling a story. It's very, very simple. It's a fact. I don't think anybody is going to argue with that. But for me, the critical thing that you have to do when you're engaging, when you're talking to funders is my experience, my time at 10, is the two things they care about are your passion, right? Because again, you are the person telling the story, so they really care that you care. And they want to know that they're going to have the widest reach possible.  And again, I will just re-emphasize that Embrace Life Commercial was done for NexaMusting for a regional PSA and it's gotten 30 million views on YouTube and won countless awards. So that right there is proof in the body. And that one in particular is such a great, great clip. It really ties out your heart's thing. Yeah, thanks again to you Matt for being super stellar. And I wanted to thank you all again for joining us today. We hope you'll join us again on December 12th, same time for our next webinar in this Baby Step series where we're very excited to discuss sewing stories from your community, what goes into the process of pre-production before you push record in capturing your story. So thank you so much Matt. Thanks again everyone, and have a wonderful day. Thanks everybody.


Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you including Philip Less, Daniel Dorado and Howard Yermish Coming up on DTNS Twitter telegram and now snap on a cell you a subscription But they're not giving us what we want in a subscription plus cyber pirates at sea That's literally true and tech to end bicycle This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, June 29th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane in Salt Lake City. I'm Wednesday's Scott Johnson And I'm the show's producer Roger Chang, you know, it is a lost opportunity to book someone named Wednesday I know you'll never do it though. That's a rare thing. You'll have you'll find a million Scott Johnson's no Wednesdays Yeah, that's that's the old saying in a world of a million Scott Johnson's there are so few Wednesdays. Where are the Wednesdays? Well, this is a Wednesday and so we start with a few tech things you should know Mozilla released Firefox 102 with a feature that strips tracking information for the end of URLs Links sometimes include a question mark followed by a bunch of numbers and letters You might look at that and say what does it mean? That's one of the most common ways to add tracking to links Firefox's query parameter stripping feature as it is so Pluckly called takes that tracking info off of the URL when you click it and when you paste it into your address bar You do need to turn it on yourself in the privacy and security settings under enhanced tracking protection One of the five US commissioners Brendan Carr former aide to Ajit Pai Shared a letter sent to CEOs at Apple and Alphabet alleging that tiktok functions as a Sophisticated surveillance tool and does not comply with app store policies of either company Carr asked each company to provide statements on why the app was allowed to remain up by July 8th US District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco ruled that former uber security chief Chief security officer Joseph Sullivan will face wire fraud charges over an alleged role in trying to cover up a 2016 cyber attack that leaked information on millions of drivers Prosecutors alleged that Sullivan agreed to pay the attackers $100,000 in Bitcoin and signed non-disclosure agreements saying that they didn't steal the data We were settled claims by all 50 US states regarding the data leak back in 2018 for $148 million I just realized something Brendan Carr should have read his letter on tiktok and then put it out there for duets He would have got even more people paying attention to it Nothing confirmed to input that its upcoming phone will use Qualcomm's Snapdragon 778 g plus system on a chip That's the mid-range one customized to offer wireless charging and reverse wireless charging Founder Carl Pay said the decision to use a mid-range chip came down to performance power consumption and of course cost The central bank of Taiwan has reportedly finished trials of its central bank digital currency and is ready to make it available for public Retail use no timeline was announced for the rollout However, Taiwan's central bank governors said that the public must be educated about the benefits an illegal Regulatory framework must be put in place before launch, but the technology itself is ready Ooh CBDCs, you know cuz you listen to this show, you know, they're on the way here comes another one All right, let's talk about those subscription services I mentioned. Well, why not? Let's start with snap They began offering a $3.99 a month subscription called snapchat plus Because everyone uses plus now Anyway offering exclusive and early access features currently it lets you change the app icon See who's rewatched your stories and pin a friend to the top of the chat history Snap does not expect this to be much of a material new revenue source That's an actual quote and expects ads will remain quote the core of our business model. Note that this subscription does not remove ads Nevertheless subscriptions are all the rage snaps latest effort joins Twitter's premium service Twitter blue telegrams got their telegram premium And there's always been or has been for quite a while Nitro from discord as examples of popular services that are free But charge for little extra features here and there So let's go through some of these offerings and talk about who they might be for yeah Yeah, cuz honestly everybody says they want a subscription that removes ads So snap not doing that I think is is going to raise some eyebrows Twitter blue is only three bucks a month slightly cheaper than snaps four dollars a month It does not remove ads it removes ads from articles you click on from partners Which is very limited, but it does give you custom app icons Duolingo does this too. I pay for Duolingo for other reasons, but it does things like custom app icons. There's also themes Top articles you get undue tweet. I guess that's the big one Yeah, that's the one that's supposed to be the big one real quick I just wanted to say that the the undue tweet feature is horribly implemented and we can talk about that later hmm Well over you mentioned discord nitro scott and I know a lot of folks who pay for this It's nine ninety nine per month with a server boost Otherwise five dollars a month without you get sort of the same type of you know expanded and custom emoji options You can have an animated avatar Let's just stand out a little bit profile badges if you want to upload something Anything above 100 megabytes is allowed if you've got nitro and you also have that capability to do HD video and screen share I don't know a ton of folks who use discord for HD video, but I know you're out there So this actually seems like one of the offerings that makes the most sense to me If you're really if you're really into discord doesn't let you change the the app icon though. What good is it? Oh, man For net ten bucks. They should let you change that point Larry to let it our chat points out you could just use Nova launcher to change any app icon You don't have to pay anybody for it. Anyway telegram premium rolled out June 19th. That one's five dollars a month It actually removes ads. So that's one that people might go. Yeah, that's enough I'll do that also increases your download Top level from two to four gigabytes offers faster downloads Doubles a lot of things like the amount of channels you can have chat folders Favorites accounts on an app You can do nice little cosmetic things like longer bio Also does voice to text if you pay for it And then lots of other like gifts and stickers and badges and app icons that are specific to premium But no ads That is nice. I will say this the one problem I have with With Twitter is that they're inconsistent with their implementation and these other two examples And you could add others to this like YouTube premium and others that are more web-based services But they have apps and so on so you know, you could argue what those are but My problem with Twitter blue was and I used it for a month I was I was really curious and I thought well, I'll pay for this if this is You know gonna be beneficial to me and the number one thing there was undue tweet and The promise there was you'll be able to not only undo the tweet Yeah, it's like everyone on Twitter's been asking for for you know, next to the end of something Yeah, next to the end of this thing, right? Yeah, in fact, this is the thing people say well If you're not gonna give us edit give us this so it's there on mobile It's horrendous you you'd use this feature and it sends you somewhere completely different than where you originally were now They may have fixed this in the last month But I couldn't get off of that thing fast because it drove me crazy the web implementation totally fine No issues worked as designed So I feel like they fumbled a little bit on their subscription because their number one selling feature was just kind of worked on mobile But Nitro I get Nitro and wasn't sure about it until I got it I thought well, what's the harm in doing the free trial and I ended up sticking with it Just for larger uploads not even HD video so much Although that's a decent advantage when you're doing conference with people or whatever But larger than 100 megabyte files Is massive Compared to what they give you is the default service So I think it just sort of depends on what you wait as a an important feature and in telegrams case Maybe it is no ads and Twitter's case. Maybe it is undo and maybe in Nitro's case They're big selling point least to me is the is less limits on size of files, but Subscriptions are clearly the future folks. We're here. We're doing it. We're going Said though, I mean when I'm looking at what snapchat plus is offering and granted I haven't used snapchat in any regular capacity for years now. It's it's I'm just I'm just kind of off I'm off the platform even though I'd you know, I check in once in a while, but I go, all right Changing app icon that might matter to you See who rewatched stories starts to get a little weird to me unless you're a brand and that is really good Intel for you To have of you know, who might be coming back to this, you know content that you're offering that is is is Designated to promote something over and over otherwise. It's like hmm. This is kind of starts to get into weird territory Pinning a friend to the top of a chat history Okay, I mean none of this sounds like something I would pay four dollars a month for but again Not the target audience and I haven't been for some time It's interesting what some of these platforms do and and in snaps case I mean said quite quite frankly, we don't really think this is gonna bring up in a bunch of money So you might go well why the company even bother? Yeah, I think they just want to see who pays because maybe they're wrong It's really interesting. I think your rights got that subscriptions are on the way I don't know which of these are actually more successful But I can tell you discord and telegrams list look to my eyes like they paid attention to features people were asking for and provided those Whereas Twitter and snap look like they came up with features. They wanted to make Or sort of tried to come up with easy stuff They could sell and both Twitter and snap say well, this really isn't the final form This is really just a test. We're really just trying things out Whereas discord and telegram are like this is our subscription product, please if it sounds compelling subscribe So you can tell the difference in those lists Yeah, I do think it's interesting that most of them come down to one or two things that will grab people Whereas the rest feels really fluffy even a discord case. It's like do I really need added animated avatars? I guess it's nice perk if you're paying and you may as well use it But is it really that big a deal more emojis? I mean really we have thousands of them Do we really need more like a lot of these don't sell me? Until I see one item larger uploads and HD screen share Yeah, and then the other stuff make you feel like you're getting more for your money Like I wouldn't paid for the emojis, but oh, it's nice to have this one right now that I wouldn't have other That's what I'm saying is I feel like snap is missing. Yes, never that is a fluffy stuff. Yeah, it's all fluff. Yeah, yeah All right, well, let's talk about riding bicycles shall we I don't currently own a bicycle I wish I did because riding a bike is fun But if you have one, you know, there are a lot of advantages you can weave through otherwise stops traffic If you live in an urban area, it's good exercise.  That's true. We are all carbon emitters There are lots of reasons why more people don't ride bikes though and one of them in most parts of the world is theft When you get to your destination, you either have to take your bike with you inside I used to do that at some of the places I worked Or go through quite a bit to secure it with multiple locks or even wheel removal Make one mistake and your bike might be gone or mostly gone everything but that one wheel Might be left when you get back Yeah, this is in in certain places a pretty rampant problem In fact, a friend of mine just had a real nice bike stolen from his garage at home and was not happy Understandably, MIT technology review has an article about a startup called uni. That's oone That's developing a kit for modular parking pods that can securely So they say store eight to 80 bicycles at a time even scooters because scooters are, you know More or less the same form factor if you want to protect your bike from rain and snow Also a nice bonus depending on where you live Riders can use a key card or smartphone to unlock a pod each of which have a security camera So the implication is that it is safe and if it isn't safe, we'll know who did it Membership is free and includes insurance against theft. So you might say cool sounds great How does uni make money the company says it sells ads on the outside of the pod structures Of course it does Right And listen, that's that's not a terrible idea. It's just, you know, we're not reinventing the wheel Ha ha uni launched in new york city and jersey city both in new jersey A state in the u.s. And has about 4 000 users with plans to expand So it's it's a it's a small amount of folks at this point But man, if you're a bicyclist this might really really appeal to you Yeah, I thought they were in new york But but I may be wrong about that one thing. I definitely was wrong about is I thought these were locks and roger Told told me in the in the pre-show meeting He's like no, I think you have to provide your unlock and he's absolutely right If you go to the fact they're like, yeah, you get access to the pod then you block the bike up So really the theft prevention here is Making it another step to get to your bike. You have to you have to unlock the pod So I'm not sure how safe this is Because anybody can have a free membership and unlock the pod and then get at your bike Which is just using the same lock that you were using before now granted They're adding security cameras and they're ensuring your bike. So they're putting their money where their mouth is Uh, and and I guess that means they think it's enough of a of a dissuasion to have that camera there And the extra step of having to get in the the pod That it'll keep people from stealing it But I thought this was going to be a lot more ironclad I had imagined what I first saw the headline that this would be a single pod You'd put your bike in someone would have to break into the pod to even get at your bike Instead it's more of just like a bike rack locked behind a door Yeah, at the very least I thought maybe the pods would have a way to isolate your bike and lock it in place Uh as part of the functionality of the pod instead what they're really just saying is Well, what if you still locked your bike, but you did it within the storage container? I mean, that's really the difference here Yeah, that that sounds Which is sure that's one more level of protection if somebody somebody really wants to steal a bike quickly they might go The pod is too complicated. I'll find another bike And I know in san francisco in particular. I mean the the bike theft issue I I know this happens a lot of other places I mean, it's such a big deal It's it's people go through So many hoops to try to make sure that their bike is not stolen Even if it's securely locked up in a garage where nobody has the key to your garage I mean theft happens and so I I feel like the you know that the promise of these pods is like Well, that's cool But all somebody has to do is figure out how to get into the pod and then it's it's the same story And that would be the same case if it was in you know the foyer of your apartment building Yeah, and if anything whenever any time somebody comes by and opens the pod to get their bike normal You know pod access to get your bike back You are at least temporarily saying here's an open pod full of all these bikes Also, it's a free membership Anybody can create an account and say whatever they want on the account use a burner phone and get in and get the bikes So I I don't know. I think what I do like about uni is that they are trying to force the conversation about bicycle parking And saying like look when when you build a building you talk all kinds of ways about how are the cars going to get in and out Where are they going to park? Nobody talks about bicycle parking. Everybody builds bike lanes and doesn't do any bicycle parking So I like the fact that they are at least doing that. So maybe if you focus less on the theft and more on Just the idea of like comfortable out of the rain bicycle parking. This is worth it right there Especially because again, it's free They're subsidizing it with ads and I imagine they get a little money from the city to install these two Yeah, they may be pretty them up. They're kind of bulky and ugly. I'm just you know I'm not really I thought they looked kind of nice. They look okay. They just look like they looked all right It's like it's like those communication containers They just plop down in Chinese cities and say all right You have internet and then it's just kind of a big ugly gnarly blob Oh, no, I thought they had like nice Rounded corners and look kind of spacey. Oh, look at it. It looks like It looks like dropped cargo from a plane or something. I don't know. I can't tell how I feel about that I also I do not condone theft of any kind particularly bicycle theft And I wonder where we know like what's the big bicycle black market because Clearly bikes are being stolen to be sold And I just don't know like I don't I don't know who who that who Who are the people that are all involved in something where it's so lucrative to steal bikes all the time? I often wonder that myself But I also just accept that it's absolutely true because bikes are stolen all the time Yeah, totally must be a big old market some kind of something or it's just steel for use I can't afford a bike. So I'm just going to take one Could be yeah, yeah Well, folks, uh, what do you think about this? You think this solves bike theft? Are you living in new york city or jersey sissy and you've been used one of these? Let us know on the socials. You can get in touch with us on twitter at dts show and on instagram dts picks dts pix We are happy to hear from you. Please do it Bloomberg reports that in february 2019 a container ship bound for new york detected a malware attack on its ship systems Now fully autonomous ships are just beginning to be tested. So it wasn't like they could, you know, take over a Boat without any people on it But many cargo ships have automated systems for steering propulsion navigation and other operations Thankfully the february intruder never gained control of the vessel's movements at least not that time But attacks can hit ports not just ships India's busiest container ports suffered a ransomware attack this past february That same month a targeted attack against a freight forwarder in washington critically affected its systems for about three weeks And in may a supply chain company in california temporarily lost access to its access asset management platform means Couldn't couldn't tell where its stuff was supposed to be A security company called blue voyants surveyed shipping companies had found 93 of them had suffered a direct breach With the average number of intrusions rising from 2.7 per company in 2020 to 3.7 last year And that affects Our logistics quite a bit because around 80 percent of global trade goes by sea You may think about trucks. You may think about planes, but most of it's going by sea So there's a large and lucrative surface area for attack The good news is shipping companies have money to spend right now and are equipping their fleets and new ships With real-time tracking devices and sensors that can connect to the shore and report problems instantly The bad news is all those sensors and connectivity provide another avenue of attack and also need to be secured Not to mention the shore based systems that need to be secured In order to secure new tech, especially in older vessels The un's international maritime organization has issued some guidelines for safety and security for companies to adopt They issued that starting in 2021 They aren't exactly pleased with the uptake though the challenge at sea is the same as it is on land Companies may not take a threat seriously until it happens to them And the reason they want to rationalize that is because the cost and time it takes to implement proper security Is not small and makes it hard for those arguing for preventative measures So there's that and then like every other industry. We also need more communication We need companies to share information on attackers with each other So they can all prevent the attacks and companies just aren't used to sharing information with each other easily So, uh, it's it's kind of the same story we have on land It's just also at sea because connectivity is reaching out into the ocean Also seems like you I know they're shipping lanes and you know certain You can't just kind of willingly go wherever you want in terms of international waters and that sort of thing But I'm surprised to hear that it's 80 percent of global trade happening there but then that Knowing that that much is happening that much is being transported via water And then have the companies act like well, we're not really we will wait until it happens to us I mean, I know they're not saying that but they're they're not reacting But dragging their future but but we've seen that with every company The reason it happens with a sea company is no different than the reason it happens with your bank or or credit bureau or whatever, right? Yeah, that's true. I guess I guess what I'm saying is it seems like I don't know for some reason I'm thinking of space forgive me for one second Um when we get to space I always go man all these ideas of space pirates. That's so overblown There's so much room up there that you're never going to have to go anywhere where someone's going to know where you are You'll always have it to yourself Sure And then I hear this about the water and I'm like it's kind of like that on a smaller scale So maybe it is a thing we should think about and worry about Well, because two two things one is you do the attack when it's coming into port So it's you can keep track of the ports a lot easier than than the roots in between right sure sure and With the connectivity You don't have to be next to it True You just need to be able to get to it over the internet and if it's always connected that means you can always get to it Yeah, I mean if you were if you're a large container ship Uh carrying something that somebody might want and the port you even if you knew Oh shoot the port i'm Coming right into is getting attacked right now. It's like what are your options? There aren't really I mean we there you have a path That's the way you got to go because nobody else can accept you You know on demand and I don't know that might be something that changes in the future Um, especially with autonomous cargo ships. I at this point. I think it's yeah, I mean it's it's a real problem I think the risk is less that somebody wants to Get the cargo although. I think that is a risk Uh, but more ransomware ransomware is where it's at right so I'm going to lock up this ship And and I don't know maybe I'll I'll send it off on a course somewhere else if it's autonomous But but even if I can just lock it off so that the crew can't properly operate it Until you transfer x a number of bitcoin into my account and then I'll unlock it Yeah It's interesting. I um, I don't know this stuff kind of fascinates me because it's not like we haven't been You know, we've been doing this for hundreds of years like shipping lanes and and and ports of call and everybody bringing in their stuff And it's been there as long as we've had boats and and seafaring technology Um, but I do think it's I don't know weirdly time that that all got in line with really great security options Not just in the ports, but on the ships themselves And if I was in charge of any of that I would want to do it sooner than later as long as long as we've had ships We've had pirates. So I guess this shouldn't surprise it Also, I want to apologize for using the word boat improperly at the beginning of this conversation I knew it as soon as it came out of my mouth It's all right. Oh because a ship and a boat are different. I called cargo ship a boat in in passing Yeah, like two Actually Our seafaring audience supports and accepts your apology. Thank you. My dad was in the navy. He would be appalled There you go. Yeah, mine was too On tuesday nasa's rocket lab Successfully launched the 55 pound capstone cubesat which is designed to orbit the moon Eventually, this is part of nasa's our team's mission to send humans to the moon for the first time since 1972 We have been talking about it for a while y'all and people are getting close rocket lab using a Electron a rocket with an add-on called the lunar photon upper stage Which has the power to send it into deep space electron is a small rocket It's made to launch a payload to lunar orbit. That's what it's made for it launched from rocket lab site in new zealand's Mahia peninsula and rocket lab told tech crunch recently that it's the highest mass and the highest performance Electron has ever had to fly by quite some margin. So they're pretty happy with the results capstone will orbit earth for nine days That's in order to generate enough speed For a trans lunar injection or tli and if all goes to plan It will eventually be able to orbit the moon the gateway space station is the next mission That would be space x delivering it as a science lab and living quarters for astronauts and ports for future spacecraft Yeah, so so a couple of things going on here the electron rocket itself is pretty cool And the capstone being a tiny little cube set Out there pioneering the orbit for the eventual space x delivery of the gateway space station Pretty cool as well. Here we here we go. No space pirates yet Yeah, not yet. We've had since 72 to work on this. Hopefully we have a few ideas Yeah, it does I've been very skeptical of the Artemis mission But it's starting to look like maybe it'll happen. We might actually see people set their feet on the moon again, which is pretty sure Well, y'all have fun up there I'm not going to the moon. You let me know if it's fun and if it's made of swiss cheese, it's all I care about Yes, over in the mail bag Thor from boar Thor says it's sunny and delightful in boar norway this time of year Thor says just wanted to add on to the tips on what to do when you want to avoid tracking data Well, still using helpful tools on your phone. This is uh a conversation that we had with lamar wilson on the show yesterday Thor says maps.me can download maps offline to your phone. That allows you to turn off all communication But you can still route with gps Since gps is the only one way communication Because you get data from satellites, but you're not sending anything back You can get directions without sharing your data maps.me can store a log of your location history locally But that's a feature that's off by default Although it is a feature But if you really want to be sure you may want to wipe the apps data after you're done using it And Thor finishes by saying sorry for not waiting until thursday. I hope scott can forgive me I'm emailing from a viking market if that helps Okay, so it's an old we made a reference last week just briefly about Thor and thursday And I think only about half of you got it because it was a very quick little quippy dumb idea. I'm just I actually didn't full disclosure. I was like I needed the joke explained thursday is named after Thor thors day Yeah, it's thors day. It's thors day. Yes, but today is odens day wednesday Yeah But it's okay. We could still read thors email on odens day Well, and Thor might be listening by thursday. That's right. So it all works very good point Also, very good tip from Thor. We should not lose sight of that This is maps.me is great Obviously, if you have gps on you want to make sure nothing else on the phone is also taking that location and logging it Any of your other apps you want to limit the other apps? But but great great idea to use that and and just say like you don't even log my location But now I could still use it for for navigation. Thank you Thor for that. That's awesome Indeed Thor you're the best if you have feedback if you have tips if you have questions anything we talk about on the show We would love to hear about it feedback at daily tech news show.com is where to send that email Thanks to you scott johnson for being with us today Even if it's not thors day, it's always a great day with scott What's been going on since we saw you last well lots of stuff I'm going to tell people to make sure they check out my core video game podcast called core It's all about video games for the modern era whether we're talking about consoles or PCs or whatever And the reason I want to point you there is because for whatever reason that show has been Popping new listeners all the time all kinds of great conversations Everybody keeps telling me how much they love it So I believe them and if you want to be like them and find out for yourselves and you're a gamer and you want more And better gaming podcast check out core everywhere you get your podcast or if you want to get there directly Just head on over the website. It's at frog pants.com slash c o r e. That's core And for everything else ping me on twitter. I'm scott johnson over there Excellent, uh, we we we always thank new bosses when we get them And we thank longtime supporters and sometimes somebody gives us a raise and we'd like to thank them as well So we'd like to thank our boss brian who did give us a raise brian sent in a real nice note uh that Cameron his son has been enjoying good day internet And we're happy to have them along for the ride Apparently cameron was the one who said, you know, I should give him a raise So brian did we also would like to shout out jackie the dog as well Because brian sent in a dog photo and that is 100 appreciated at all times. Yeah as I understand it brian said I've you've got five dollars Who do you want to give it to and and we were the first choice? So So really cameron's a new boss if you look at it that way Indeed. Yes. Yes. Let's thank our brand new boss cameron. Thank you brand new boss cameron and jack Yeah Yeah, it could be you tomorrow. Are you going to be the next boss? Let's find out uh speaking of good day internet, uh gdi Rolls right after we wrap up dtns if you want to know more patreon.com slash dtns Is where you can find out just a reminder. We do the show live monday through friday for p.m. Eastern 200 utc find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live We are back again tomorrow because we do it every weekday. Justin robber young will be with us then talk to you soon This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frog pants dot com Diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this program


There's a lot of organizations out there that are trying to make the world a better place. Most of them are conventional in what they consider to be part of reality. And they operate within a restricted framework. The Pachamama Alliance is drawing on other threads. I've heard the stories about the founding of the Pachamama Alliance, of being contacted by indigenous people in dreams. I'm not sure how vocal you are about that origin story, because it's a little bit uncomfortable. It's a little bit out of bounds. People are gonna think that maybe you're delusional, maybe you're given to new age fantasies or something like that. But this incursion of a larger reality into our society is so absolutely necessary. We have to expand our understanding of what is real and therefore what is possible. So the Pachamama Alliance has a kind of openness to a larger reality that incorporates what indigenous people have been telling us, that incorporates direct communication from nature, that says that this crisis that we face is not just a matter of the smartest people in the world, the white people, the educated people, figuring out a better solution and then unveiling it and imposing it on everybody through our new systems, our new solutions. Like there is an understanding that our operating system, our the dominant culture, our operating system is too small. We need to bring something else into it. That's what I appreciate about the Pachamama Alliance. It's almost a unique bridge between like some very, very, I wouldn't say mainstream, but people who are near the core of the power establishment, a bridge between that and the Oshawa or the Kogi or people who are still holding ancient ways of knowing and ancient capacities that have been lost to human beings in the dominant culture. So yes, the Pachamama Alliance is a unique bridge between those worlds, really able to speak to power in a way that power can hear. And at the same time, channeling through their speech experiences information that has come from well outside the universe of those in power.


Hi everyone, I'll be talking about master key KDM secure identity-based encryption from bearings This is a joint work with Sanjam garg and Mohammed Agiabadi First, let me give you some context on KDM security key-dependent message consider a public encryption scheme and An encryption of a message M the security of the public encryption scheme guarantees that The message the plain text M is hidden as long as the secret key is not revealed But now consider the message The secret key itself Then to hide the secret key You need to rely on the security of the public encryption scheme and to argue security of the scheme You need The secret key to be hidden in the first place So there is a circular issue here And in fact in in general, it's not clear If whether semantic security of public encryption implies key dependent message security where In general the message can depend on the secret key So the adversary can choose a function and gets an encryption of the function applied on the secret key And security should still hold even in the presence of such encryption So this Setting can appear a little bit artificial maybe at first sight, but in fact it It arises in many different settings Example would be fully homomorphic encryption where which uses Gentry's bootstrapping Where a homomorphic encryption encrypts its own secret key, but it's also used In many other places such as function secret sharing or it's used to build designated verifier non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs or even in very recent IE constructions Let me present you the state of the art for key dependent message security of encryption The first important results Will be an amplification to RM that says that to achieve KDM security For any function described by a bounded south circuit It is sufficient to prove KDM security for much-respected castle function namely affine functions And it turns out There exists some KDM secure chosen plain Secure encryption scheme for affine functions And in fact, you can build it from pretty much any Assumption that is public encryption such as DDH LWE Quadrature quesitivity LPN CDH In the case of KDM chosen plain text attack is well understood It's pretty much solved But how about chosen cipher text attack Which is a defect to security notion for encryption and because it captures in particular man in the middle attacks CCN KDM encryption is much harder to get This has been solved by Kame Nishital Which builds KDM CCA secure encryption scheme from any KDM CPA secure plus an IZK That relies on the norium paradigm But this comes at the use of extra assumption and IZK Then it's hope finds builds Directly from pairings KDM CCA secure encryption, which is simpler and more efficient But still the pairings is a qualitatively stronger assumption. That's what's needed for public key encryption for KDM CPA public encryption So Kitagawa and Tanaka in 2018 showed that any CCA in CCA encryption that relies on hash proof system That can be built from DDH QR or decisional composite residuosity And which are similar assumption that what's needed for KDM CPA encryption all of this can be Upgraded to KDM CCA All right, and later on Kitagawa and Matsuda showed that in fact KDM CPA encryption KDM CCA encryptions are equivalent Which is remarkable Because this is not known to be true in the ined CPA For in CPA in CCA encryption. This is true in the KDM world So all of this to say that the situation for KDM secure Public key encryption is Well understood the case is pretty much solved even though for KDM CCA encryption it took much longer and it was more challenging So now the question is What about KDM security for more advanced encryption schemes? in fact the example I gave such as fully homomorphic encryption require a circular security of More advanced encryption scheme than simple vanilla public key encryption Our contribution to answer this question Tackles the case of identity-based encryption Which is one of the simplest non-trivial generalization of public key encryption? It's fairly well understood. In fact, you can build identity-based encryption from all of these assumptions that give public key encryption It's a natural starting point to answer this question Let me recall briefly what identity-based encryption is Essentially identity-based encryption is a public key encryption where any bit string can serve as the public key So there are some public parameters in the sky and with this Anybody can encrypt a message under some identity which could be for example an email address and that serves as a public key and and Users receive specific secret key which are called user secret key and which depend on their identity and with this Users are able to decrypt a message as long as the identity match Hearing and if the identity don't match the user secret key should not reveal anything about the encrypted message So these users secret key are generated from a so-called master secret key That is built by a trusted third party In fact security even if an adversary gets access to many users secret key as long as none of the Corrupted secret key can decrypt the ciphertext This is standard security for identity-based encryption The only known results Secure identity-based encryption From standard assumption is by Alperin, Sheriff and Picard and They consider a setting where in addition to user secret keys The adversary gets access to encryption of messages that are functions of user secret keys chosen by the adversary and They build this from LWE This is an interesting first step, but in fact it fails to capture some application in particular a One interesting application of IABE is to get CCA secure public encryption by the CHK transform And in fact this notion of KDM security doesn't allow to obtain KDM CCA secure encryption So a stronger notion is master key KDM security Which is essentially the same except now the adversary can get access to Encryptions of messages that are functions on the master secret key and not the user secret key and that turns out to be sufficient To apply the CHK transform among other things This is a more desirable and a stronger KDM security notion and this is what we achieve in our work We build this from standard assumption in pairing groups so first I'll Recall briefly how the KDM CPA encryption of BHHO works Because this is on a building block for our construction And it relies on the DDH assumption and then I'm gonna show that is actually BHHO techniques are compatible with a some identity-based encryption that rely on pairings that Use the dual system encryption methodology introduced by Wethers and in fact Combining this to is possible, but it's not enough to get KDM identity-based encryption And I'll show you in the last step how to actually get The result we want All right, so let's see how the KDM CPA encryption of BHHO looks like so We'll be using a primer group generated by a little G and For now think of the secret key as just a random vector of exponent And the public contains a random vector of group elements G to the A here and also The inner product of this G to the A with K in the exponent Which is just one group element to encrypt One samples a random exponent R and computes a randomized Variants of the public key. So this is gonna be G to the A times R. I just exponentiated the vector here and The key encapsulation here will also be just a randomized version of that and this is multiplied by a Message that is a group element So to decrypt it is simple you just use the secret key and Multiply it with the header of the ciphertext here to get the encapsulation key and recover the message So far so good There is a problem though If we want to get KDM security that means the message is gonna be a fine function on the secret key However, there is a mismatch between the ciphertext space, which is a group element and the secret key space which is exponents And also to apply the amplification results that I mentioned what we want is actually on a fine function on the Binary decomposition on the bits description of the secret key So the way BHHO solves this issue is by taking a secret key to be a vector of group elements G to the K instead of exponents But still to decrypt one needs to recover K the vector of exponents So to solve this dilemma BHHO Sets the vector K to be a bit string So that it's actually efficient To brute force the then get the discrete logarithm of G to the K So that decryption is efficient Of course, as I mentioned Needs to be taken appropriately large so that there is enough entropy in the secret key to ensure security So now let me show you the in the techniques used to prove in CPA security of the scheme even before going into KDM security So security will rely on a computational assumption, which is DDH and which Says that it is hard to distinguish a random vector That is proportional to G to the A Right, so it's blue. It's in the span of G to the A. It's G to the A raised to some exponent from a uniformly random vector of group elements G to the U that does not lie in the span of G to the A All right, so these two things are computationally indistinguishable and now at this point of the proof We will rely on a statistical argument a Random vector K multiplied by a blue Vector is independent statistically from a random vector K multiplied by a Linearity independent Vector of group elements G to the U. So linear independence translates into statistical independence All right, and suppose who knows this is called a universal hash function and Now because this value here is completely independent from that value It can serve as a one-time pad and hide the message M. All right, this is roughly how the proof goes and Now suppose actually the message is of the form K times W plus gamma and a fine function of the key And now we'll use this G to the U and we'll shift it appropriately Just like this so that This basically removes the key component of the message And now we are back essentially to the previous setting of in CPA encryption Okay, so we will be using the same statistical argument To hide the message it's which is switched to zero This is what we obtain at this point. We want to switch back this red vector here G to the U Back to the span of a All right, the reason we do that is because we Want to basically move on after we've done the first challenge ciphertext So we have made this challenge ciphertext independent of the message and we want to keep doing this for many Chinese ciphertexts and every time we'll be using entropy from the secret key K and More precisely we'll be using the projection of K under the red the red space So to do that and to use it as a one-time pad we need to switch back every type of text Back to the blue space here. All right But the the header of the ciphertext will still be in the red subspace That means it is still not in the span of a G to the a Right, and this is because we have performed this switch which was necessary to prove KDM security So as I said, then we move on to the next Chinese ciphertext and repeat the exact same argument Right using chance and so on and so forth so now I'm gonna give I'm gonna explain exactly the same proof again, but in a much higher level view So that was a little bit technical now I'm just gonna abstract away most of the details and I'm gonna repeat the proof So now for the sake of simplicity consider the secret key has two bit of entropy the blue bit and the red bit The public key allows to create ciphertext with the blue entropy Which contains a header and an encapsulation That hides the message which is a function of the secret key. So the proof we've just seen starts by Switching this ciphertext from the blue space to the red space using the DDH assumption and now the statistical Argument uses the entropy of the red space, which is not revealed by the public key To hide the message effort of SK as we have seen before Which back the encapsulation to the blue space and we move Ciphertext and so on and so forth. This is how the proof looks like Now let me show you that existing identity-based encryption from pairing Are compatible with the VHHO proof techniques in particular that is the case for IBE relying on the methodology that's called dual system encryption by Watters In this IBE We have now a secret key that's called a master secret key that Has before as two bits of entropy the blue bit the red bit public key allows users to compute ciphertext with blue bits of entropy and That are associated with identity The new technical novelty here is that the adversary not only gets to see the public key and the challenge ciphertext But also user secret keys Which in this IBE looks like this they are the master secret key Which contains the blue and the red bit of entropy plus a mask that lies in the blue subspace and now We want to do the same proof as VHHO, which first involves switching the ciphertext blue component to the red component using a subgroup membership assumption in our case DDH and So that is done in the current challenge ciphertext here and now The hope is to use the entropy from that red block to hide the message to act as a one-time bad But now the statistical argument that was used before doesn't hold in particular because the user secret key Partially reveals some information about this red entropy. They contain the red entropy bit of the master secret key So that doesn't hold anymore We'll solve this technical challenge using dual system encryption methodology Which consists of first a switching one by one the user secret key From so we'll switch this This block from blue to red Again using a computational assumption So we'll have two computational assumption one in the ciphertext space and one in the secret key space So technically the ciphertext will belong to a group G1 secret key will belong to group G2 both of which are prime order and There will be combined using what's called a pairing Which goes from G1 to G2 and ends up in the target group and It's possible to assume DHH in G1 and G2 All right, so this is what allows to switch from blue to red in our case and So once we've done that for a particular user secret key We will be using a statistical one-time argument that Uses the fact that the identity from this user secret key doesn't match The identity from the current challenge ciphertext. In fact, it should not If the identity match by correctness of the scheme, we should be able to recover the message And there would be no security So we need to use the fact that this identity don't match and this is where it's used This argument is one time this is important. It's um in the case of identity-based encryption It typically relies on pairwise independent hash function And it allows us to say that this red block this entropy is independent from that one and so this red entropy conserves as a mask for the Red entropy bit of the master secret key here. So what that does is Remove the red bit of entropy of the master secret key So now we have like a truncated user secret key That doesn't even decrypt correctly the challenge ciphertext. We are considering But that's okay. It was not supposed to decrypt it anyway because the identity don't match And of course as a sanity check this user secret key should still be able to decrypt correctly honestly generated ciphertext from the public key Right so to summarize and this is a core ideas of dual system encryption methodology There is two type of key of user secret key the full one That contains all the bits of entropy of msk that decrypts blue ciphertext and red one Which allows to switch from blue to red And there is no way to notice the difference and then there is a truncated User secret key which is technically called semi functional Which only decrypts correctly the honestly generated ciphertext, but not the challenge ciphertext all right So what are we done here was So after that we switch back the mask to the blue space. So we've done Effectively we've hidden completely the red entropy bit of the master secret key. We've removed it from the user secret key. All right And this will be done again for every user secret key one by one Right, so we'll just repeat the exact same argument And so on and so forth um At the end we'll essentially have removed the red component of all the user secret keys And now we can ignore them And perform the exact same bh ho proof as we've seen before now We can actually say this red block here will statistically hide the message And we're done We've well we are done for the first challenge cipher Now it seems like we have succeeded to build a master key kdm secure identity base encryption But in fact Let's be careful here. We'll we have only considered one challenge ciphertext And you may think oh well, let's just do a hybrid argument and do the exact same thing for all ciphertext one by one But in fact that doesn't work. We'll see why And also note that as opposed to the typical in cpa setting For which one challenge ciphertext implies many challenge ciphertext Generically using a hybrid argument. This is not the case for kdm security All right, one challenge ciphertext does not imply many challenge ciphertext So what goes wrong if to the second ciphertext? We'll do the same proof again. So it starts with the blue space and we want to turn it into Uh, like we were in a turn this blue boxes into red boxes using computational assumption But first If we want to be able to switch blue to red, this should not be noticed by the adversary In particular, if you have a user secret keys that's truncated semi functional, this is clearly noticeable So the first thing we do even before moving on to the second ciphertext It's to switch back all the user secret key to full mode All right, just by reverting the changes we've done before So we can do that And and now we can perform The same argument on the ciphertext. So we switch it to red and so on and so forth And now uh, we want to rely on this statistical argument that we've used before But it fails because this argument was one time and it only talks about one identity the identity of one user secret key And one challenge ciphertext And it fails because here If you look at the header of the ciphertext, there are many of them that are in the red subspace So in fact for this to work It would need to be an argument that taking takes into account Many challenge ciphertext. So we cannot use pairwise independence We need to use something stronger All right, so typical dual system encryption Uh, fundamentally fails for that reason that it does not take into account many challenge ciphertext At once All right, so the technical reason is the the header here cannot be switched back to blue Because of the shift I've showed you before. All right So we need to use another argument So as I've said our scheme uses a An argument that Handles all the ciphertext challenge ciphertext at once All right, and these borrows techniques from uh, how finds precaution tricks Uh, which actually achieves this in a different setting Namely, they achieve they they show techniques that handles many challenge ciphertext to get 90 secure identity based encryption where the security loss does not grow with the number of challenge ciphertext So these techniques Uh, we adapt and they were from a fairly different context and this is remarkable that it's useful and to achieve Uh, a different goal namely kdm security for identity based encryption This is the last, uh piece of Technical tools that we use to get master key kdm identity based encryption So to summarize we've built the first kdm secure identity based encryption which satisfies A master key kdm security where the adversary not only gets to see user secret keys But also encryptions of messages That are function of the master secret key Which is strong enough to capture applications such as chk transform to get kdm cca secure encryption And natural open problems include Building the same thing but from weaker assumptions such as cdh This is a legitimate question to ask since we know how to build identity based encryption from cdh And more generally interesting question include Uh, can we build kdm secure advanced encryption? For example homomorphic encryption from standard assumption Come to my talk. Thank you for your attention