After 8 years of Security B-Sides Rochester, it’s time for me to turn it over to new leadership that wants to keep the conference going. It’s exciting that people still want to. My role as of recent has been the person that invested the most time doing the running around to organize the conference but that’s not to say I “run” the conference – it truly is run by volunteers and one of my jobs was to try and maintain some consistency while letting people do what they want.
My plan two years ago was to let people know I was over-committing my time, ask for help, distribute my responsibilities, formalize our organization, and bring more people on that were passionate about the idea. These tasks were accomplished and I hope lay the groundwork for the next generation of the con. We have a lot bigger core team, probably the biggest since we started, and I’m hoping most of them come back for this year’s event because if anything worked last year, it was thanks to those people.
Myself and some of the organizers have been working with the new organizer of the event, Forrest, and I think he shares my perspective that BSidesROC is setup more like community of people which needs to passionate core people that can help maintain. It can’t be done alone.
Why now?
I’m completely stepping down now because pretending I have the availability to do something this big is unfair to the people that really do have the time and interest to keep it going. There’s a bunch of things I’ve helped start that are aging better than I am:
- Interlock Rochester is into their 9th year
- I picked up the baton for Rochester 2600 more than 9 years ago
- BSidesROC’s 9th year will be in 2019
I have lots of excuses for leaving or lots of interesting places I’m going to invest my time depending on how you look at it. If you’re wondering how much time goest into organizing something like this, in 2016 I spent ~200 hours between January and April working on it off an on. 2017 and 2018 were around ~150. There’s no exact amount that it requies so that’s probably more than it “needs” to meet a minimum viable product, but much of that goes into helping people develop new ideas, come up with insane ones that we’ll never do, and run around chasing down whether the sane ones are actually do-able.
Here’s a breakdown of different projects over the last 3 years and which ones were BSidesROC related:
BSidesROC 2019
Yes there will be a BSidesROC 2019 and yes it’ll follow tenants of being a hacker con that people have grown to enjoy. I don’t know exactly what the next BSidesROC will look like, and that’s a great thing. I know that there’s a big team working on it with new ideas, and I’ll support them however they need. I’m looking forward to attending BSidesROC and maybe volunteering if possible.
If you’re interested in helping out or hearing about the plans, send an email to [email protected].