WHO SUBMITTED?

Total of 219 submissions. This is up quite a bit from last year’s 168.

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

Using dubious, incomplete, and (somewhat) best guess methods:

  • 200 Male
  • 56 Female
  • 3 Animaniacs

WHAT WAS SUBMITTED?

Talks submitted per track (most submissions submit to more than one track, detailing how the talk would change per track):

  • OTM: 70
  • Belay It: 58
  • Belay It 20: 34
  • Bring It On: 97
  • Bring It On 20: 68
  • Build It: 43
  • Build It 20: 37

Word Trends (shows how many times each word appeared in the submissions.  There are many more obviously, but here are some that stood out):

Security 252
Team 63
Threat 57
Attack 49
Code 44
Help 38
Cyber 37
Research 36
Vulnerabilities 35
Privacy 33
Trust 32
Learning 27
Hacking 23
Community 23
Solution 22
Cloud 19
User 15
Encryption 13
Defense 10
Kubernetes 9
Policy 8
Moose 2
Phreaking 1
China 1

WHO WAS ACCEPTED?

Submissions:

  • 41 of the 219 submissions were accepted, making our acceptance rate 18.7%.
  • 2 Alternates were also chosen

Speakers:

  • There are 58 speakers total (including closing plenary, one speaker is on stage twice)
  • 15 have spoken at ShmooCon before
  • 43 are first time ShmooCon Speakers
  • 10 of the 43 have never spoken at a major conference before

HOW DO SPEAKERS GET CHOSEN?

Our review committee this year was comprised of 19 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, Heidi and Bruce, along with the Program Chairs, take that information and start to create the line up.  This is a game of score, topic, and track balancing, and can take several days as we work across time zones.

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

Heidi Potter* – Conference Organizer
Bruce Potter*- Conference Organizer
Ben Laurie* – Program Chair
Jon Callas* – Program Chair
Ian Amit
Matt Aromatorio
Wade Benson*
Frank Clowes
Andrew Hobbs*
Michelle Klinger
Toby Kohlenberg*
Todd Nagengast*
Dominic Spill
Krassimir Tzvetanov
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.