Some words from BSides Wellington

Hey there! We’ve got a bit of news to share with you, you can skip to the end if you’re short on time, but we’d appreciate you reading this in its entirety if you can.

We’d like to start out by giving some much-needed acknowledgement and thanks to the unsung heroes of BSides Wellington, specifically:

• Lucy, who managed registration and held down so much over the course of the conference.
• Andrew, who oversaw all of our volunteers and kept our logistics running smoothly.
• Sharrow, who made our green room a fantastic experience among many other things.
• Vex, for being on-call for useful advice and helping us out during our event.
• All our volunteers, you were impeccable, and we couldn’t have done this without you.
• Our speakers, thanks so much for all of the effort, long travel, and getting up on our stages to share a piece of your experiences with our crowd.
• Our sponsors, for providing that sweet sweet cold hard cash (yes, love alone is not enough).
• The Kiwicon Crue, we owe our existence in part to your decisions and your wise words.
• Our attendees and the community, without you lot, there would be no conference!

Many people have told us that they enjoyed BSides Wellington, they loved the conference and had a great experience. We appreciate how well people received the event we put together, and we enjoyed the event ourselves too.

However, the process of running BSides Wellington was bittersweet for us as a team. We made some mistakes, both logistically and personally, and at times it cost us our well-being to an unacceptable degree. Our formation as a team was in retrospect, quite spontaneous and without consideration. We’ve had successes as well as failures, and had moments that were really enjoyable, as well as some that weren’t great at all.

We learned valuable lessons about ourselves and each other in this process, and after carefully considering our future as a team, and what’s best for our community, we’ve concluded that we will be disbanding BSides Wellington in its current form. This means we will not be running an event this year, or for the foreseeable future.

We’re proud of what we created, but we’ve concluded that it’s not going to work out a second time around for us. The future is scary, but also super exciting, and maybe someone else will use the BSides name to run something different in the future? We can’t wait to see what our community comes up with!

Until next time,
The BSides Wellington Crew

@sputina
@skooooch
@chrisblunt
@secvalve

P.S. There will be a Kiwicon this year instead

P.P.S. Click here to go to the old website