Next week in Las Vegas, there’s a new conference in town. “Unconference,” that is. Security BSides will coincide with the popular Black Hat and Defcon conferences, and take place at a location off of the strip. It is a free, two-day event made up of 65 attendees (so far), 15 presenters, and six organizers.
The concept of SecurityBSides resulted from reaction to a number of rejections to the call for papers (CFP) for Black Hat USA 2009. According to the organizers:
A number of quality speakers were rejected, not due to lack of quality but lack of space and time. Any constrained system must operate within the bounds to which it has defined itself. Conferences are constrained to the eight hours a day for however many days they run. Our goal is to provide people with options by removing those barriers and providing more options of speakers, topics, and events.
The idea, according to the event’s mission, is not to compete with Black Hat and Defcon, but to complement it with an additional roster of speakers. It was launched in the same fashion as the popular Barcamp series, which expands expertise and speakers to new audiences, with the philosophy behind Noisebridge and other hacker spaces, which promote “doing” in addition to talking. While the first event will happen in conjunction with Black Hat and Defcon, the goal is to make SecurityBSides a global community with coinciding with multiple events worldwide.
In true unconference fashion, SecurityBSides is largely relying on community input to determine final topics. Presenters add their proposed talks to the speaker list and participants vote on what they want to hear via Twitter. Those talks that garner the most conversation get added to the agenda
While the event is technically “invite-only” anyone can add themselves to the invite list up until the day of the event. There’s already a pretty solid list of panelists on the roster, including Luis Corrons, H.D. Moore, Jennifer Jabbusch, David Rook and Val Smith.
The event is still open to individual and corporate sponsors. Details on the voting, panels attendees and so on can be found on the Web site or on the Twitter feed.
