BSides SF is one of the largest security conferences in the Bay Area and my all-time favorite.
Having presented twice at BSides SF, sharing some best practices on writing the submission and succeeding in the highly competitive CFP selection process.
- Practitioner’s First – Unlike other conferences where your LinkedIn profile and what you have accomplished makes a huge difference in the selection criteria, the selection process at BSidesSF is highly skewed towards practitioners; so much so that the CFP review process is 100% double-blind that is even the selection committee will not know the prospective presenters or their background. This gives a huge advantage to folks who don’t have a fancy title or a lot of presentations already under their belt.
- Depth > Breadth – Over the several years I have presented and attended the conference, it has been my observation that talks that go deep into one topic are favored more than talks that are shallow or try to cover a lot. My first talk was all about HITRUST (GRC) and achieving it on a budget and the second one on Privacy – both were deep-dives talk with actual frameworks on how to achieve the end goals. Don’t try to cover GRC, Privacy, AppSec, etc. in one talk. It’s ok if you think your title is narrow and will not resonate with a ton of audience, your odds are better as long as it covers the depth of the topic.
- Focus on ‘how’ – This is slightly more relevant to the deep-dive talks. If you are submitting your talk as deep-dive i.e. 45 min instead of the regular 30 min talk, ensure that you cover a lot of ‘how‘ in the outline and subsequently the presentation. In my first talk on HITRUST, I had a detailed outline and then sticked to it in the presentation as well where I shared the actual templates used to prepare for HITRUST and even sent the templates to many after the presentation.
- Spend time on the outline – Just like practitioners submitting the nomination, the review committee is equally an expert in their relevant domains and they do read each nomination. I would highly encourage breaking the outline into the relevant sections and adding as much detail as possible with time-slots. And don’t forget to check the markdown version before hitting the submit button.
Lastly, get ahead of your reservations in submitting the CFP. A common reservation I see for not submitting the nomination is folks want a breakthrough idea that is novel and will make a dent in the profession. In reality, even if you are making small incremental differences in changing the paradigm on how a certain activity is done then that should be your idea for presentation.
And if you are not doing anything breakthrough or making incremental progress in bringing the profession forward, then its time to introspect where do you focus your energy and time throughout the year.
All the best!