SEC-T Events
Today the SEC-T Organization is involved in five annual events. SEC-T Spring Pub, the SEC-T2ion, the Community Night, the SEC-T conference and Club SEC-T . Most of the events take place around the same time in September each year. The events and their intentions are described below in the order they take place during the year.
The Spring Pub Event
The spring pub event was set up to be a small social event on the half way point between two conferences. The intention of the spring pub event is to provide an opportunity for people to meet, listen to a couple of lightning talks and have fun together. Most importantly the spring pub event is open for everyone, for free, with complimentary food and drinks. The cost for the spring pub is split between three sponsors and the SEC-T Organization’s savings.
The Spring Pub Event usually takes place on a Thursday towards the end of April and has no fixed venue.
The Community Event
Since the main SEC-T conference is a paid event we understand that there are many potential attendees that cannot afford to come even with our low regular and student prices. For this purpose we have since 2016 started hosting a community evening event where everyone is welcome to attend free of charge. The community night event takes place the evening before the conference.
The community night is geared towards students and people not directly working in the field as well as the conference attendees that want to expand their knowledge and meet like minded individuals for an informative and interesting evening. But, at the same time, talks given at the community night might be highly relevant also for the attendees of the main conference event, basically extending the conference with more interesting content.
Anyone who would like to give a talk should contact the SEC-T organizers by responding to the official CFP. We would however like to explore a more spontaneous approach in the future. All speakers accepted as Community Night speakers are automatically eligible to be backup speakers for drop-outs of the main event. A backup speaker giving a talk at the main SEC-T event is fully eligible for all SEC-T speaker benefits (apart from the honorary lest they become a speaker).
Should any of the speakers accepted to the main SEC-T conference want to give a community night talk they are always welcome to do so given available time.
The community night talks might not be recorded or live streamed.
The SEC-T2ion Event
The SEC-T2ion Event [di-sect-ion] is the two day in-depth workshops on the two days preceding the SEC-T Conference Event.
The SEC-T Organizers have decided that, as an addition to the conference, some topics should be given the opportunity for an in-depth exploration. The purpose of these explorations is to expand on relevant topics for this years talks or related to popular topics at last years event.
The extent of the SEC-T2ion classes will be determined by the number of students that apply to participate and the number of accepted teachers. Both are expected to vary between years depending on current interests and the availability of other similar classes. But our intention is for the SEC-T2ion to:
- Provide a maximum of six classes on different topics
- Accept a maximum of 15 students per class
- Provide students with material and diplomas for attending
- Give teachers an opportunity to disseminate their deep knowledge on a topic using their own material.
Upon being accepted, students may attend only their enrolled class. SEC-T2ion will not be recorded or streamed and the copyright for all material stays with the teachers.
As an attendee you should not be surprised to find us providing the same training courses that are available through other conference trainings. You might however be surprised to see that the price is significantly lower and the classes significantly smaller thanks to our non-profit motive.
The SEC-T Conference Event
The SEC-T Conference is the main annual event and the reason behind the formation of SEC-T.
The SEC-T Organizers have decided that providing an affordable, two day, single track IT-security conference with a maximum of 1000 attendees* is the optimal event for a number of reasons. These are mainly:
- Many of those who need to be made aware of the state of information security today are those without large education budgets or maybe not even in a role where they think they need to know about security. We also see that those with a larger budget tend to spend most of it going to one expensive conference far away leaving room only for one such conference a year. Providing an affordable conference enables those that normally would not attend to do so.
- Two consecutive days seems to be both what people are able to focus on talks during and also simply the most amount of time people seem to be able to take off from work. If this changes let us know, but two days seem to be optimal.
- If we had more attendees it would not be possible to organize such a tight schedule any more, thus it would lead to fewer speakers and require more staff effort with everything from registration to support. Therefore we prefer to have a maximum of 1000 attendees*.
- Running a multi track conference would require twice the number of speakers to be organized which of course would be a strain on our current budget and time for organizing. At the same time there would be fewer talks any one person could attend if we open the schedule to provide attendees the time needed to change rooms. We also appreciate the potential in having all our attendees actually participate in all talks as this makes for a better foundation in discussions among everyone involved. Therefore we prefer to have a single track conference.
The SEC-T Conference is traditionally taking place on Thursday and Friday the third week of September. We used to be at the venue Nalen but as of 2019 this was changed to Münchenbryggeriet in Stockholm, Sweden.
* In 2018 we hit the limit for our old venue with 440 attendees, 2019 we had 800 attendees at our new venue, Münchenbryggeriet. As of 2021 we reached the limit of the new venue with 1200 attendees. This will most likely be the new limit to our event for the foreseeable future. Or until we can convince the venue otherwise.
The Club SEC-T Event
Since the SEC-T conference is running a tight schedule this leaves little time for social networking during the day time. Also after a full day of interesting talks a large portion of our attendees appreciate the opportunity to lounge, mingle and play some games. For this purpose we also organize an event called Club SEC-T on the evening of the first of our two conference days. The SEC-T Club is to be seen as a separate event to which you are invited to attend as a participant in the SEC-T Conference. The SEC-T Club is of course also open to non conference goers. We intend to let this event grow to incorporate more interesting artists, stage acts, activities, games, etc. The Club SEC-T is a collaborative project with Syntax Error.