Platform used Zoom & Discord

hardwear.io Security Conference Netherlands 2020

2020 shaped into a strange year with Health Safety concerns due to COVID19 we moved our physical events to Virtual Training & Conference for our USA & Netherlands Edition. 

As earlier mentioned in our blog post  Hardwear.io 2020 Training Days   the 6th edition of Hardware Conference Netherlands was conducted via Zoom.

Test Run

On 30th Oct at 6 PM, We decided to perform Test Runs with all the moderators & Dj music.
The music was planned to be played 30 minutes before going live. Additionally, we tested transitions from music to event slides.

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Checklist: 

  1. Create Breakout rooms to test Speaker mic, video & slide
  2. Breakout room for Q&A

We had breakout rooms to test speaker mic/video & slide sharing within a 5 min window. Simultaneously we had to keep the Q&A breakout room ready for 10 mins for speaker 1 & Speaker test room for the 2nd Speaker. We tested the transitions for different breakout sessions.

Issues:

We faced initial hiccups with transitioning of screens from Music to Live event slides. Breakout room notification was an issue with the new update by Zoom.

Breakout rooms in Zoom didn’t have individual control & if there were multiple breakout rooms then all had to be opened at one go. We set the settings of breakout rooms for speakers to manually assign & uncheck automatic assigning of attendees. For Q&A we had set to auto assign attendees & we manually added the Speaker & moderator as well to directly join the room. We had to play with the settings for Breakout sessions during the whole live session.

Conference Day (1st-2nd Oct)

Day 1:

We had incredible line up from experts covering topics like Firmware extraction by EMFI, Reverse engineering of ECC, Taking precaution when using IOMMU, Reversing & Emulating Samsung’s Shannon

The time was 5:30 PM CEST & we were all set to start the event with a bang. Music on the floor with our DJ for 25 mins. We opened the breakout room for Testing Speaker 1 for 5 mins & our moderator completed the test. 

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The start was smooth with easy screen transitions & smooth entering of attendees. While our moderators were tracking the next speakers from the list of attendees, we had a tense moment when we couldn’t trace our 2nd speaker from live attendees & we had just 5 mins to test their mic/camera, screen share. 

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While all this was happening on Zoom, the rest of our team was on Social Media posting fascinating insights & monitoring the excitement of our attendees on social media. The Tweets were automated as per the Agenda of the Conference, while the rest of the live tweets were managed by our team.

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Discord was buzzing with inquisitive minds while solving Wall Challenges. We also shared some exciting snaps of the Speaker Decks & soon we had many questions for Q&A from our Discord Community

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Day 2:

‘Silicon Day’, with line up of experts covering Silicon related topics, like extraction of Firmware with Taming Hydrofluoric acid, Looking at Silicon, FPGA attacks, CANanalyze, Reverse Engineering P6 Microcode

The Final day of the Conference ended with crazy beats by our DJ & many attendees wanting the Conference to just continue with more talks.

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Concept Squad

Brains behind this incredible Hardwear.io Virtual Conference Netherlands

Antriksh Shah
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Antriksh Shah

Conference Host & Main Track Q&A

Belinda Choong
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Belinda Choong

Moderator Speaker Test Room

Andrea Simonca
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Andrea Simonca

Moderate Q&A in the discussion room with speaker

Sparsh Johari
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Sparsh Johari

Zoom Setup & Managing Sessions

Karishma Lunawat
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Karishma Lunawat

Manage Discord engagement

Aman Aryan
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Aman Aryan

DJ - Playing Music during the break Sessions

Harshit Mahajan
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Harshit Mahajan

Coordinator Zoom Hosting & Whataspp group management

Hitesh Madhwani
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Hitesh Madhwani

Managing Live Conference Tweets

Aishwarya Krishnan
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Aishwarya Krishnan

Creative Designer