October Update: Current Planning Status
Hello everyone!
My name is Ryan, and as of last year I've taken over as the lead organizer for CactusCon. While we are in the planning phases of our upcoming virtual conference, I'd like to keep everyone informed as to how things are shaping up for the crew. I'm sharing this update with everyone to provide some transparency into our planning efforts.
Ryan’s coffee-fueled brain dump:
CactusCon 9 will be taking place February 5-7, 2021. As usual, general admission will be FREE. Just yesterday, we announced our two keynote speakers: Eva Galperin & April C. Wright
Keynote Announcement: Eva Galperin
Keynote Announcement: April C. Wright
I am super excited to have two badass women in the field representing their causes and supporting our con and overall community. While we’re coming up to CactusCon #9, and though we’ve had upwards of 1.5k unique individuals attend our last con, this is our first foray into the virtual realm. This has the potential to increase our reach, so the onus is on us to reach as wide of an audience as possible.
This year’s theme is "The Hitchhacker’s Guide to InfoSec." We'll be taking ideas and imagery from the HHGG series in order to present a general information source providing notes on how to navigate the waters of the security realm. Attendees can look to our event as their Guide through our crazy, security-minded world.
Just remember — “Don’t Panic”
Our Call for Papers (CFP) is currently open and will be closing on October 18, 2020. If you haven't yet submitted a talk, please consider doing so. Remember to keep things fresh and feel free to address any topics you may not have seen at previous CactusCon or other security con events (e.g. emotional distress discussions). We are aiming for a 2-day conference, as many of the 3-day conferences seem to be a bit much, but we're leaving our scheduling open for a possible third day. We have talks (20 or 50 min) and workshops (2 or 4 hrs) coming in, so we’ll have multiple streams for those bad boys. We are contemplating how many talk streams we'll have per day. We’ll know more once the CFP wraps.
If you'd like to submit a virtual talk or workshop to our CFP, please see: https://www.cactuscon.com/cfp
We do not have any villages planned this year given the complexities associated with organizing them virtually. Our goal is to come up with other types of general activities in lieu of our normal hardware hacking and lock-picking villages. If anyone has general ideas or recommendations, let alone wants to be involved directly, please contact me. As for our CTF event, we are currently working with a group that everyone should enjoy quite a bit. More details on this when we can announce the event officially.
For speakers, we will not be requiring a specific PPT template, and we have not done so in past years. Speakers are free to use whatever templates/graphics they so choose. However, once our artist starts churning out his awesome work, I will put together an example template. I will also share out whatever artwork is available with speakers such that they can choose to incorporate and/or draw inspiration from it. As a note, this is the first year that CactusCon talks will be recorded. I’m extremely excited that my first year at the helm will be followed by an online presence for the con.
We’ll be using Discord for our server, and we already have a fantastic bot developer on board (thanks to Alex Hoffman for joining our cause!). I believe we’ll be streaming via YouTube, but this is something I need to nail down in the next few weeks. While the videos are going to be pre-recorded, including keynotes, we’ll be playing them according to a schedule rather than simply opening them all up at once.
Both merchandise sales and badge planning are ongoing. Badge development is currently up in the air, as just have many other cons have found recently, hardware badges may be too much to hope for in the times of COVID-19. Graphics are being worked on now, but we're not quite sure when they’ll be ready for distro. As for sponsors, I’m starting to reach out to prospects now (finalizing the prospectus). If you are interested in sponsoring our conference, please contact me.
That's it for now gang! If you'd like to be involved in any way, shape, or form, feel free to contact me via Twitter or at ryan [at] cactuscon [d o t] com.
Ryan "Chaps" Chapman (@rj_chap)