WHO SUBMITTED?
Total of 222 Submissions.  40 more than last year.

35 Accepted for normal speaking slots.  2 Alternates.
Acceptance Rate = 15.77%, with alternates = 16.67%

302 unique names on submissions (some submissions had more than one author, some authors made more than one submission).

Using dubious best guess methods (based on indication by name and/or personal knowledge):

  • 263 male
  • 39 female <— highest percentage yet (12.9%)

WHAT WAS SUBMITTED?
Talks submitted per track (many talks were submitted to multiple tracks):

  • One Track Mind – 84
  • Build It – 64
  • Belay It – 69
  • Bring It On – 98

One Track Mind – Often gets tagged onto other submissions with an “I could shorten this” comment, which explains the high number of submissions.
Build It – Up from last year by 20.  But more submissions in general this year.
Belay It – Submissions were back up, almost double what we had last year.
Bring it On –  Continues to be the track with the highest number of submissions.  Very few talks are submitted to this track alone.

Word Trends:

Shows how many times each word appeared in the submissions.  There are many more obviously, but here are some that stood out.

254 – security
120 – data
74 – software
72 – network
61 – code
48 – research
45 – attack
45 – vulnerabilities
44 – analysis
30 – community
29 – cyber <–down from last year by 1!
20 – hacking
18 – defense <- way down
16 – privacy
10 – hackers
2 – bounty
1 – fisherman
1 – zombies

HOW DO SPEAKERS GET CHOSEN?
Our selection committee this year was comprised of 18 people.  We use an open source system called OpenConf to collect, read and review the CFP proposals.  There are no hard rules for our reviewers, we  prefer that they read each paper with their own unique point of view and skill sets. However, the committee keeps in mind ShmooCon’s emphasis on new and upcoming speakers – both to ShmooCon and to the industry in general.  There is also a strong emphasis on never before presented material as well as talks that include the release of open source code.  Talks that have been given repeatedly or have been submitted to multiple cons in the future tend to get rated down by our reviewers.  Talks that have been given before but promise new/updated material are given more leeway.

After the committee has finished doing their reviews the Program Chairs along with Bruce and Heidi take that information and start to build a program.  This is a game of score, topic, and track balancing and can take several days as we work across time zones.

This year’s selection committee consisted of the following people:

Ben Laurie* – Program Chair
Jon Callas* – Program Chair
Heidi Potter* – Conference Organizer
Bruce Potter*- Conference Organizer
Iftach Iam Amit
Wade Benson*
Tamzen Cannoy*
Sandy Clark
Frank Clowes
Andrew Hobbs*
Toby Kohlenberg*
Logan Lodge*
Todd Nagengast*
Cat Okita, Akamai
Chris John Riley
Tim Vidas*
and then those who shall not be named

*members of The Shmoo Group

TO EVERYONE WHO SUBMITTED:
Thank you.  We say this every year but it’s worth repeating:  We very much appreciate your submission and we encourage you to submit again next year or to some alternate venue.  Many great talks are turned away and it is our hope that some of those reach audiences by other means.