Purplecon 2019
An excellent and very refreshing infosec con, with an audience that was not made up of the usual suspects! Purplecon is constructive, similar to the OWASP standard that all talks need to have solutions or mitigations, and this is starting to creep into everyone's expectations elsewhere as well.
The non-content aspects of Purplecon deserve highlighting:
- Ticket sales were staggered into three waves, so it wasn't all sold out in 5 minutes (like the 2018 edition), and gave time to people needing corporate signoff.
- Ticket sales were split into two categories, with half of them explicitly reserved for people self-identifying as a marginalised group of some sort, any sort, don't tell us the details, we trust you.
- The aesthetic was purple, flowery, sparkly rather than black hoodie death metal flames. We don't all have to rebel in the same way, as Alex said.
- Instead of coffee, we had complementary bubble tea.
- The afternoon break was a long one, with the explicit request to find new people to talk to, to ask & answer questions, and to keep an open space in circles to allow people to join easily ... I think this could have benefitted from being more structured, rather than being spontaneously successful.
The con was livestreamed, the talks are on Youtube (https://purplecon.nz/talks/, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS45xFo74VF546tbfXXtKDO03cVrAalM6) and every talk was a Keynote. On the topic of livestreaming – Purplecon consider the free streaming as a way to get more people to access infosec content, without having to take actual seats away from people who will benefit from being there live. At least one big org ran their own internal conference, with their content fitted in around the Purplecon stream – which was also available in two Wellington hostelries, Meow and Hashigo Zake ...