Call for Workshops 2020
Security BSides London workshops are all about sharing information, spreading knowledge and having a laugh.
For BSides London 2019 you brought a great diversity of topics: we had networking, offensive security, but also threat modelling and other topics from the blue side. The rooms were full and what is most important - the attendees loved it! Time to make it even better.
2020 is a year when BSides London is happening for the 10th time, hence the theme is BS level 10 and we want to take workshops to 11. We are open to all matters around information security - and we mean all things! Your workshop can be technical, business-oriented or anything in between as long it gives the community a hands-on experience. If you have a really leftfield (and reasonably safe…) idea, don’t worry about whether it’s possible, just submit it and we’ll work it out together. Hacking, building things, breaking things, soldering, wiring, making spaceships; but also managing a project, writing a blog, building a team, managing disclosures, mental health and keeping sane while hacking, the floor is open and all are welcome.
We will be holding the workshops on Tuesday, June 2nd (a day before the main BSides event) at the ILEC Conference Centre, 47 Lillie Road, London, SW6 1UD,
The workshops are:
- Informal: no school, no grades - it’s about sharing and learning
- Limited to small groups: this year it’s around 30 participants but we are flexible
- Interactive: you, the speaker, mix with your participants and discuss as a group
- Time limited: you decide how long it’s going to take but we need to know upfront - we have 2h and 4h slots available
- Goal oriented: your students will want to know what skill/experience they will gain from your workshop (fun content counts too!)
Some tips to get you started:
- The subject can be anything from information security 101 to brain-teasingly insane level of difficulty as we want to both introduce new members to the community and teach old dogs some new tricks, but please make sure you define the knowledge level required to attend
- The workshop has to be reasonably safe for everyone so setting things on fire is a probably a no - but anything less than that is open for discussion
- Highlight what will the participants will gain from your workshop and what they need to bring (knowledge and hardware)
- Try reaching out to previous speakers
If you're an expert in your field and you want to share your passion, we’re here for you. Submit your workshop proposal via the form below and we can help make it happen at BSides London 2020!
To fill the submission form, apart from the usual things (like a name) you will need:- A short bio paragraph about you
- Workshop title and short description (think what would fit in a BSides booklet)
- Workshop length, skill level required and general interest area (red, blue, hardware, etc.)
Those are, more or less, the questions on the form - there are no tricky ones. You don’t need to prepare anything at this stage (that is, you don’t need to upload any documents), but we will ask you for some materials if you get to the second stage so it’s good to have them ready - they don’t need to be final yet though!
We’re here to help, so feel free to drop us a line at workshop2020 [at-sign] securitybsides [dot] org [dot] uk or via Twitter @BSidesLondon with any questions you may have - it will help us improve this and future events.
Last year we got many questions about accommodation, travel expenses and other benefits and this time we want to be clear on this beforehand: being a not-for-profit community driven event (we are all volunteers) we are unfortunately unable to pay for any of those.
We’ll be with you at each stage letting you know whether you’ve made it through the selection round or not. If not, we’ll be able to offer you other ways to participate in the event and will contact everyone individually with more information.
We wish you all the best in preparing your workshop and look forward to seeing you at Security BSides London 2020!
All the best
the @BSidesLondon team
NB. Security BSides London is committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected; be assured that the information being collected is for internal use only and it will only be used in accordance with your permission.
Timeline for Submissions
The timeline for this year’s workshops is:
- 23:59:58 on March 16th - deadline for workshop submissions. All submissions then go into a selection round. We would appreciate if you didn’t drop everything on us on the last day but late submissions are treated the same as early ones. We will contact everyone within a week.
- April 13th - If your workshop passes the selection round, we’ll ask you to send us a more detailed plan by this date. This gives you only about two to three weeks, so it’s worth having your plan ready before the deadline.
- May 1st – announcement of the final list of workshops.
- CfW opensFebruary 3rd
- CfW submissions closeMarch 16th
- CfW Final selection confirmationsMay 1st
- BSides London!June 3rd, 2020