 Hi, everyone. Today's talk is about making an impact from India to the rest of the world by building and nurturing women in for second communities. We all know that women are under represented in the infosec sector. India is one of the most diverse and fastest growing countries in the world. And due to the past is growth women often are left behind. The average female literacy rate is 79.7%. While in India, the average rate is just 65.46 as per women's web. The women that enter the technology workforce is even lesser and cyber security is further less. In India, a million engineers graduate a year, but there are only 10% of them are women. Now out of the 10% we only find 0.5% in infosec. That's how the stats are more or less. The ratio and the cyber security team is really dim and this is widely recognized. Now, what is the motivation behind this talk? Like any other person, I also have a lot of questions in mind. So for anyone in the audience, have you ever felt you are among like 1000 people and you're just odd one out? Have you ever felt that you needed a mentor and you couldn't find one? Or you were very hesitant to talk to people because you're not sure how your approach would be taken. We all know this feels like female role models. And how many infosec women champions are there, especially when we talk about India or handful of them? Now there are so many unconscious biases that we all have, whether I'm adequate for the group or not, whether I'm part of IT or an infosec group or not. We are all hesitant in speaking with the people who are not like us. We always look for a space to speak without feeling being judged. We as women always look for something like 10 on 10. Everything is well at home, husband to be in the best space, child to have the best life, which leaves very less space for ourselves to think about. Our own aspirations, weekdays are hectic and weekends are even more hectic to think about anything other than family, other than our own personal work. And according to one of the survey, women working in the cyber security currently accounts for 25% of the overall workforce. And if we say this number as per cyber security venture, this is increased in the past few years, like this was 24% in 2019. And this was 11% in 2017. So we are seeing the gradual shift, but this has to be more. This has to grow big time. And I felt that we need more women in the infosec space and which is what motivated me to take up infosec girls as a community and take it forward. Now, a bit about myself, like I'm Vandana Verma and I'm one of the security relations leader at SNEAK taking care of the APJ region. I'm also serving on the OVAS global board as a vice chairperson. I also lead communities like infosec girls, infosec diversity, and infosec kids. Today, I'm going to be speaking about how we started infosec girls. Where did we go? Where did we land? And how are the things that actually shaved up? Now, before I start off the stop. So for people in the audience or men in the audience, have you ever wanted to bring more women and infosec and your area of work? I've talked about bringing diversity and inclusion in one of my talk at diversity on diversity and inclusion at Global Apps at DC that you might want to check out. So what this talk is about? This talk is about infosec girls, as I said, and the community that we've built in India. What the community means to us? How we started the community? What are the challenges faced during this journey? How did we overcome those challenges? What are the achievements and the future road map that we have? Along the journey of the presentation, I'll share the framework on how to start a community or join a community of your interest. We've been given, we've been giving web application security training as well, which you can find it on Infosec Girls' Githbook. We'll also link it to the website as well so that the pre-content is for everyone. Now, what is the real impact that we have made? I wanted to put it across in a way that we start off with the achievements and then we talk about other things. So we have actually students and professionals who are secure jobs. There are first time speakers who have been to global conferences and there are people who actually be mentored, who are growing in the industry. So there are a thousand plus people whom we have mentored in Infosec. Now, about the community journey, how did it all started? It all started in 2014. There was a downfall where it was stopped and then I rejuvenated with few other girls in 2017. After that, we launched multiple chapters, Pune, Mumbai, Delhi, Bhopal and so many chapters and now we have over 25 chapters but when we talk about those chapters, it's not all a rosy picture. There were challenges, there are challenges that we are facing that we have faced and it is a community. It is always working like everyone is always working hard to support and encourage everyone. Now, if I talk about challenges, the first one being gathering people, making sure there is an interest that sparks in them. Then talking about balancing the family, how am I going to balance it out over the weekend? Because if there is a meeting over the weekend or on a Friday night, how am I going to be managing? Now, there were very less women in cybersecurity. How to motivate them to join the workforce? How to motivate them to be part of the whole ecosystem? Now, the right picture, if you see the picture on the right hand side, there was a person who wanted to speak and that person brought their kids to the meet-ups so that they also can join and then they also can be part of the whole ecosystem. Places to gather. Now, right now we are virtual so we use the virtual platforms but in the beginning we are issues in gathering at a place where we look for a venue. Then finding the venue, facilities at the venue because we needed a room where in which has a projector and then providing other details like access to the washroom and water. Sustainable location for everyone. That's one big challenge and speakers, the most important part. Motivating people to tell them that yes, you can do it because there's so many preconceived notions that if I don't do right, if there's something that goes wrong, if this doesn't happen right or what if people will make fun of us. So there are a lot of things that actually were going around in people's mind and lack of awareness, what this community is all about, whether it's the community that we actually want. I've often heard people saying that tech is for men and kitchen is for women. It is nothing to do with the gender. It is not just women in particular but everyone in general who needs to be enlightened. We all have notion whether I can speak at the meet-up or not if we would be voodoo or bullied. Time management for people and then apprehensions about speaking. Now, in the beginning we had very low participation and outreach and less people knowing about the community. We did not realize that to spread awareness via multiple mediums to reach the audience is important, which led to the community low turn up. So in the beginning it was difficult to bring even more participants. We used to have only three to four participants but we never lost hope. Just relying on mouth word, no, you need medium to share. And then relying on the social media, that's what we started off. We started hosting our meet-up. We started sharing via Twitter, LinkedIn and many other places. So it was started with an ocean that, okay, this is the thing we want. So there were two people who started it and they tried hosting the meet-up, did a few things but it did not work out. So they stopped it all together. Then they had an idea but could not take it forward due to personal and professional commitments. At some point it was all halted. So we rejuvenated it and we divided it but we were worried how to stop this from happening again. We wanted a sustainability plan for it. So we did have our failures along the journey. We did do the survival plan. We did have a survival plan and we still have it because we have seen from our failures and then we wanted to stay motivated. So we make sure that we connect every now and then we speak to each other and this time has been very critical. So everybody needed each other. So this is how we received acceptance after all the failures that we had because failures are the stepping stones to make you grow. If it happens, if it becomes successful, that means your idea worked out. If it doesn't become so successful, that means you've learned something from that and you might do something different the next time. And if I talk about acceptance, people started showing interest in the cause and wanted to know more about InfoSec Girls, supported it. As a result, companies were ready to provide venues and other support like sponsorships. Now we do have four to five venues available in most cities where we host meetups. This is saying keep doing the work. Don't wait for the reward. Things will automatically turn out for the positive. A lot of first time speakers have started reaching out to us for joining the groups. And how do InfoSec Girls come contribute to the bigger aspect? We host meetups, which is for sharing the knowledge. And we're hosted in multiple countries. And then if I talk about an informal connects that we do over lunches, dinners at different places like conferences and different meetup groups. Collaboration on ideas is one important thing that we don't miss out on because without collaborating on ideas, I think things can work out. And if I talk about hosting the in-person meets, which was there to provide a platform and providing like a motivating factor or boosting their confidence. So we helped in boosting their confidence assured that we are here to be with you to make you comfortable. We are working towards having chapters and unsung places in India where people don't think of going. So we've started reaching those places and mentoring the people. Sometimes in-person meetups are not possible. Like it is a critical time. We're hosting all our meetups online via different channels. We livestream almost every other week. Our YouTube channel consists of webinars, podcasts, and we regularly try to get industry experts to guide us on various topics. So we have InfoSec Girls' YouTube channel as well to conduct the global meets to expose the women on the global women side with the global cybersecurity leaders. There's another thing that is very, very important is there's not much which has been done about educating students about cybersecurity. I believe there has to be a separate program for bringing cybersecurity awareness among the kids. And that's when we started off with InfoSec Kids and we started hosting the meet or the proper trainings at the colleges and schools. The pros and cons of cyberspace needs to be assimilated deep down into the roots right from the start. This is how we can make a change and our nation cyber safe. One more approach other than the awareness program would be giving them exposure to unmediated scenarios in the form of games and challenges. This will catch their attention and make them brainstorm about the importance of cybersecurity of the devices and the data. This is how they would use gadgets in safe manner. We started bringing cybersecurity to the college students and giving them opportunities before even going moving out of the college and hence the entire team of InfoSec Girls spanning all over India and some parts outside is trying to bridge a gap which is there. We collaborate with international institutes and drive our goal further. The disbalance is global. It's not just India. It's everywhere. We aim to bring diversity and inclusion to the workforce everywhere. Cyber security is all about ideas and ideas rule the world. Besides the learning is a lifelong process. The earlier it starts the better and sponsorships and scholarships definitely will help. As part of InfoSec Girls, we do provide scholarships for various forums and conferences. We also have collaborated with many conferences and companies and institutions to provide sponsorships for women and students to attend specific conferences. The rational is to provide exposure to them and to help them come out of their cocoon and providing scholarship will only capitalize their enthusiasm towards learning things and help stimulate the process and help stimulate their thinking process thereby making the world a better place to learn, share and grow. We identify that we need to upscale people and we build the training and started delivering at a number of places. This is how it has helped many people. It has been free or minimally charged for the people to kickstart their journey in InfoSec. We started giving workshops at different cities, colleges and the conferences. We've given many conferences, many workshops at the global conferences as well. Now that the gap has been identified, our mission is to bridge the gap by educating more and more passionate people towards cyber security by providing the right set of requirements which are there in the industry. When we talk about this gap of jobs where we are not finding the right people for the job, it's best that we start learning and educating people in the industry and we start doing that by mentorship, by giving them career guidance, by helping them find the job. Because if we look at the stats for the people that organization are looking for, it's huge. It's huge. There's so much. Now apart from that, we do have some success stories. So these are some of the testimonials from the different people in the industry and who has gone benefited out of InfoSec Girls and InfoSec Girls has helped them grow. This is one of the mentorship program that we started where we hosted many mentors and mentees via a platform and we bashed them and it ran for six weeks and then there's another program that has started again for six weeks so that people can understand and get to know each other every week. They can connect and meet with each other. And what did we achieve so far? Out of all of this, we have reached many chapters. We've connected constantly with different people and did so much more about upskilling different things, being open and accessible and started from the beginning when training small and then going big. And there are efforts to go behind the scenes wherein people are creating posters, people are creating sessions, people are setting up speakers, people are becoming the budding speakers so that new people can come forward and experiment with the new news. Now let me tell you one interesting aspect that we have almost 80% of the speakers who are one-time speakers or the first-time speakers. Apart from that, there's a community opinion and feedback which does matter where we always try and understand what community is looking for, there are fresh ideas, new learning opportunities and keeping a tab on the pulse of the community, which is very, very important. Now, how do I start my own community? It's one question. So should I contribute or should I contribute to a community? Remember one thing, if you want to be part of any community, look for a community nearby. If you feel that your values or ethos match with that community, please join it. And if you have the bandwidth to start a new one, go ahead and start a new one. People will eventually start coming in. But make sure that it is sustainable because starting is something is easy but maintaining that is very, very tough. And what about framework for a community? Build, manage, sustain and improve. Building is easy, then you have to manage it, sustain it and keep improving it. Sustainable community can run for a long time and more chapters around the world, course-free conferences, encourage participants to join new initiators, focus on educating people. These are the things that we have in our future roadmap. And the key takeaway is pay it forward. If you've got help from someone, please do pay it forward. It is only going back in a good way to you. Partner with the organization, ask for help. It is way more, sometimes it is needed and we just don't ask for help. But that's the most incredible thing. We always ask for help if it is needed. And we are making progress, but there is more that we can do. This is a long way to go. This is a wonderful quote by Michelle Obama. A greatness comes when we appreciate each other's stance. When we learn from each other, when we lean on each other and we live by this. We also started two communities InfoSec Kids and InfoSec Diversity. InfoSec Kids was started with a motive to make sure that we have more kids and the awareness for their parents and InfoSec Diversity to bring cybersecurity to everyone, like to the common people. You can reach us anytime on InfoSecGirls.in, hello at InfoSecGirls.in or you can reach me at my email address one that I did, InfoSecGirls.com, Twitter, Facebook, we are available at all the places. Do feel free to reach us anytime. Thank you so much. It was wonderful to be part of Linux Open Source Summit.