Dc6004 #3 (July 04)

[toxicle]

myDEFCON #3 (July 04)
Date: Friday 2nd July 2004 (First Friday of the month)
Time: 9:00 p.m.
Venue: Craven Cafe, Tanjung Bungah

Topics will only be disclosed during the meet. This is to ensure exclusivity and attendance. Please be punctual. Bring anyone who's interested. Don't forget your gear and gadgets. We love to see them.

[highwizard]

myDEFCON #3 (July 04)
Date: 2nd July 2004
Time: 9:00 p.m.
Venue: Craven Cafe, Tanjung Bungah

Topics will only be disclosed during the meet. This is to ensure exclusivity and attendance. Please be punctual. Bring anyone who's interested. Don't forget your gear and gadgets. We love to see them.

Well, if people don't know what topics are going to be discussed they may not want to come... And who cares about exclusivity?

[TheCotMan]

Well, if people don't know what topics are going to be discussed they may not want to come... And who cares about exclusivity?

I was president of a Linux User Group for a short time and have held offices in various other techie groups (including an elected member of a local ACM chapter) as well as an attendee of meetings as just a regular member for various groups.

Speaking from experience, exclusivity through government is not the way to create a strong userbase of people who are skilled. What you create is an atomosphere where cliques are encouraged, and more energy is wasted on politics or people trying to inflate their own egos than anything more productive.

If you target your presentations at a high enough level, with openness on items being discussed, clueless newbies who do not want to learn anything will leave, as they will be afraid of having their true ignorance show.

If your topics are, "downloading and using the latest 'sploits" then the population of your meetings should be easily guessed.

If your topics are on such things as "avoiding race conditions in coding", "recognizing potential risks of buffer overruns in code", "building your own cryptographic algorithm" and "patches to your kernel to add more security" then the kind of people you will attract will likely be those who either want to learn, or actually know something. Even a less complex topic like "Using cvs to download, install and configure the latest kismet to work with your card and gps" is a good topic.

Certainly, this does not mean to make all of your topics require a lot of experience, but including such presentations will help you to dump the people who have the "1337-ness" of a door stop and no desire to learn.

Mix up the level of difficulty.

Though the following is a "HOWTO" for Linux User Groups, much of the wisdom in it is good. Even if you do not like the guy who made it, or have been involved in flame wars with him in the past does not mean you should discount or trivialize these suggestions:

http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Linux_PR/newlug.html

(No, this above doc was not made by me, but I do like many of the ideas he provides.)

[toxicle]

Well, if people don't know what topics are going to be discussed they may not want to come... And who cares about exclusivity?

Well, the past 2 meetings has been quite successful except for the fact that the guys come in late and I have to repeat what I talked about. I hoped the word "exclusivity" would generate more punctual attendance.

Since we're very new, this is just an experiment to see which approach would fit our culture here in Penang, Malaysia.

I consider our past topics very basic .. eg. "DC6004 #1 Securing and breaking into your wireless AP" and "DC6004 #2 Encryption & Man in the middle attacks".
Even topics like that generate a lot of eager but clueless faces.

I believe DCGROUPS are meant to serve the local community. We hope to attract more "technical" members so we can talk about something more advanced and not risk having the newbies leave in confusion.

Any tips or comments much appreciated.
:)

[TheCotMan]

Any tips or comments much appreciated.
:)

Here some suggestions:

As a leader, delegate, delegate, delegate; do not try to do it all on your own. Groups which are founded, hosted, controlled and run by one person tend to disappear when that one person leaves. Include several "team players" as founders of a group and make sure they are willing to do work and contribute. (Some people like only to have the title as a vanity namesake but do not contribute to the group. Eject them from office and replace them with people who contribute.) I offer no comment on style of government (dictatorship, appointment, elections, autonomous collective, etc.)

By relying on other people to complete tasks, work is shared, and the loss of a single key member does not lead to the destruction of the group.

Create rules only as issues arise or your group will faulter under the weight of rules and regulations.

Use both positive reward and negative feedback in person and on lists to create the kind of atmosphere you desire. People will see what behavior is not tolerated by watching others get burned, and also see what behavior is welcomed from those who are *respected* in your group. ("It's all about your reputation" and "leaders should set an example for others to follow.")

Avoid or obliterate any hints of "Us vs. Them" which start to infest your group. Aguements of BSD vs. Linux vs. Windows vs MacOS, or Politics and Religion serve only to polarize people against each other and do not help, "the cause." You may as well argue which flavor of ice cream is best. Both are dumb and waste time.

The same can be said for people who suggests your local DC group should view as enemies the local 2600 group or Mac User group or PC User Group or Linux User group-- don't do this. Cooperation is much better. You can share (steal) speakers from other groups and even encourage members to attend both. By creating artificial competition between groups, you serve to assist in dividing people into groups of friend or enemy, when this does not serve your purpose.

(I'll stop here. My posts are too long as it is.)

[toxicle]

I was president of a Linux User Group for a short time and have held offices in various other techie groups (including an elected member of a local ACM chapter) as well as an attendee of meetings as just a regular member for various groups.

Speaking from experience, exclusivity through government is not the way to create a strong userbase of people who are skilled. What you create is an atomosphere where cliques are encouraged, and more energy is wasted on politics or people trying to inflate their own egos than anything more productive.

If you target your presentations at a high enough level, with openness on items being discussed, clueless newbies who do not want to learn anything will leave, as they will be afraid of having their true ignorance show.

If your topics are, "downloading and using the latest 'sploits" then the population of your meetings should be easily guessed.

If your topics are on such things as "avoiding race conditions in coding", "recognizing potential risks of buffer overruns in code", "building your own cryptographic algorithm" and "patches to your kernel to add more security" then the kind of people you will attract will likely be those who either want to learn, or actually know something. Even a less complex topic like "Using cvs to download, install and configure the latest kismet to work with your card and gps" is a good topic.

Certainly, this does not mean to make all of your topics require a lot of experience, but including such presentations will help you to dump the people who have the "1337-ness" of a door stop and no desire to learn.

Mix up the level of difficulty.

Though the following is a "HOWTO" for Linux User Groups, much of the wisdom in it is good. Even if you do not like the guy who made it, or have been involved in flame wars with him in the past does not mean you should discount or trivialize these suggestions:

http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Linux_PR/newlug.html

(No, this above doc was not made by me, but I do like many of the ideas he provides.)

TheCotMan,
Thanks for the lengthy reply. Great idea ... mixing levels good. We will try that on the next meeting. The main problem we have now is we have very eager newbie members. We always end up with a lot of very newbie questions that we have a hard time answering, due to the fact that you need at least some basic to understand.

Well .. we're constantly adapting to our audience and have decided to much more basic topics just to help the eager newbies get off the ground. Talking about PGP already had them scratching their heads.

Another problem we have is with the forums. I know for a fact that they're reading the posts but not replying to them. No one wants to volunteer as staff members, no one asks questions on the forum (they only ask IRL), no one answers questions. Any tips would help ;) TIA

I really appreciate tips and comments from you guys who are more experienced in organising groups. We hope the best for your local groups and for you guys to enjoy DEFCON 12.

Have fun !

[toxicle]

Here some suggestions:

As a leader, delegate, delegate, delegate; do not try to do it all on your own. Groups which are founded, hosted, controlled and run by one person tend to disappear when that one person leaves. Include several "team players" as founders of a group and make sure they are willing to do work and contribute. (Some people like only to have the title as a vanity namesake but do not contribute to the group. Eject them from office and replace them with people who contribute.) I offer no comment on style of government (dictatorship, appointment, elections, autonomous collective, etc.)

By relying on other people to complete tasks, work is shared, and the loss of a single key member does not lead to the destruction of the group.

Create rules only as issues arise or your group will faulter under the weight of rules and regulations.

Use both positive reward and negative feedback in person and on lists to create the kind of atmosphere you desire. People will see what behavior is not tolerated by watching others get burned, and also see what behavior is welcomed from those who are *respected* in your group. ("It's all about your reputation" and "leaders should set an example for others to follow.")

Avoid or obliterate any hints of "Us vs. Them" which start to infest your group. Aguements of BSD vs. Linux vs. Windows vs MacOS, or Politics and Religion serve only to polarize people against each other and do not help, "the cause." You may as well argue which flavor of ice cream is best. Both are dumb and waste time.

The same can be said for people who suggests your local DC group should view as enemies the local 2600 group or Mac User group or PC User Group or Linux User group-- don't do this. Cooperation is much better. You can share (steal) speakers from other groups and even encourage members to attend both. By creating artificial competition between groups, you serve to assist in dividing people into groups of friend or enemy, when this does not serve your purpose.

(I'll stop here. My posts are too long as it is.)

Great suggestions! Thank you.
I'm sure from reading my posts you can tell this is just a 2 man show. Me and my partner does most about everything. We only managed to get a webmaster to do the front page for us. Forum is done by me personally.

I've been trying to delegate ... but there's not much to delegate since they're no volunteers :(

As far as local groups go .. we're definately not competing. In fact I just got back from a PDA users group (trying to pull some crowd over). We use other local popular sites to post our meeting details. I, of course made sure I had at least some respect in the forums before posting our meetings.

Our group's idea kicked off in just less than 2 weeks by just me and my partner. I hope to improve my management and people skills, meet more like minded people, improve on my speaking.

Thanks ;)