A stein full of positivity: Beercon2
This past week I had the pleasure of helping out at Beercon2: The Rise of the Rookie, a virtual information security conference put on by The Beer Farmers. As the title suggest this conference was all about Rookie speakers, people new to giving presentations. The best introduction to this conference I can probably give you is this one minute hype video that was made.
Across two days, 29 speakers delivered 27 outstanding talks that would not have been out of place at some of the bigger name conferences. In this blog post I will talk about how I experienced this event, both helping out behind the scenes and as a first time speaker.
With a global pandemic making in person events near impossible some conferences have chosen to go virtual. Many more however have sadly decided to cancel all together, citing reasons such as 'nobody is waiting for more zoom meetings'. While more established speakers will probably still be asked to deliver their talks, the opportunities for first time speakers are drastically reduced. Beercon2 looked to do the exact opposite and give a platform to these first time speakers, and succeeded in doing so in marvelous fashion.
A big part of the aforementioned success was not simply giving the rookies a platform to speak, but also offering them guidance and coaching in delivering their first talk. This came in the form of a mentoring workshop, put on by more experienced speakers. In this workshop tips and tricks were given and any questions the speakers might have were answered. After this workshop all the mentors remained available to answer questions and help practicing talks in the mentoring channel on the Beercon2 Slack server. In this channel it was just mentors and speakers, even the organizers stepped back from it, creating a very safe environment without judgement to share any doubts or concerns a rookie speaker might have.
This Slack server, and the mentoring channel in particular, was absolutely buzzing in the weeks leading up to the conference. People were clearly excited, tips were shared, and many speakers helped each other doing practice runs of their presentations. A true community and support system was forming, people helped each other with their talks, and I'm sure many lasting friendships were born.
Thursday morning it was finally time to kick off the conference, I found myself in the lobby of our zoom meeting to do audio/video/screen share checks with all the speakers ~20 minutes before they went on the virtual stage. Every. Single. One. showed up well in advance, fully prepared and excited. At other conferences I've volunteered at I have seen issues with getting speakers on stage in time, speakers disappearing when they were needed or showing up so late that sound checks came in jeopardy, not here. No ego, no arrogance, just passionate people excited to get to present. Getting speakers prepared and in the right place at the right time was the easiest job ever.
Friday, day two of the conference, was from a volunteering standpoint no different than day one and everything went off without a hitch. Once again everybody was lovely, and most importantly rocking their talks. The quality of all the talks was impressive, as someone on Twitter remarked "nobody tuning in would have known they were rookies".
This did however add to my nerves, as I was scheduled to speak at 18:00, as last talk of the event. Right before I went on friends and mentors gave me some encouraging words, reminded me to drink water and wished me luck. In the meeting with the hosts we had another quick 5 minute chat to get ready before we went live.
While I was nervous at the start this faded about two sentences in and I just gave my presentation. Just like everybody said would happen. I feel it went well and am happy with it, and a river of positive feedback would suggest this feeling is justified. If you want to see my talk its available on YouTube.
After all the talks the hosts gave a short closing remark before we went on to the after party, a beer farmer hosted pub quiz over at InfosecHappyHour. It was a bit rowdy at times but that is to be expected from a pub, and the quiz was a hilarious closing to an amazing conference.
There is a twitter list with all the speakers in it that I can recommend you to follow because they are all equally amazing, and all the talks are available on YouTube.
I had an absolute blast both helping out and speaking myself. So a massive thank you to the entire organization for making this possible, giving me and other rookies the chance to deliver our first talk.
The Beer Farmers:
The Mentors:
And last but not least, my fellow roadie Gerard.