WHO SUBMITTED?
Total of 231 submissions.  up 4% from last year.

36 Accepted for normal speaking slots, plus closing plenary.
Acceptance Rate = 15.55%

296 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, google, and/or personal knowledge):

  • 254 male
  • 42 female
  • 1 squirrel

WHAT WAS SUBMITTED?
Talks submitted per track:

  • One Track Mind – 61 <—  Telling and making us think about next year. **cue suspenseful music**
  • Build It – 49
  • Belay It – 45
  • Bring It On – 76

Word Trends:

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

234 – security
96 – cyber
72 – tools
67 – attack
56 – threat
45 – analysis
37 – software
30 – vulnerabilities
27 – defense
25 – iot
24 – research
23 – cloud
22 – community
17 – hackers
17 – policy
15 – windows
8 – real-world
1 – marshmallow

WHO WAS ACCEPTED?
61 Speakers

Roughly:

  • 14 are first time speakers any major conference/event
  • 30 are first time speakers at ShmooCon
  • 17 have spoken at ShmooCon at least once before

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
Tamzen Cannoy*
Frank Clowes
GM1*
Andrew Hobbs*
Laura 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.