Kawaiicon

Kiwicon came first. Kiwicon started decades ago with a couple of hundred nerds down at Pipitea campus with a sense of bewilderment that anyone showed up at all, and the cleaners refusing to do the men’s bathroom overnight.

We’ve grown up since then. Not too much.

Over the next few years, it became clear to the then-Crüe that the audience was bigger than they had thought. Attendees weren’t just hackers, or even corporate security teams trying to get out of work for a couple of days, but were coming from all sorts of backgrounds because they thought this information security thing was interesting. Just like we do.

So the ‘con changed. Because we wanted them to feel welcome too.

Kawaiicon’s like we took some of the black metal away from Kiwicon and drew hearts over their i’s with scented pens. We’ll always have black t-shirts and lasers, but we’ll also have glitter fountains. Maybe a petting zoo.

Some of the original Kiwicon Crüe are still around, and have happily offloaded some responsibility off onto the comparative newcomers (who make up in organisation ability for what they lack in sanity).

Between us we try to create a space to bring together the different groups of people that are involved with or interested in infosec. From deep nerdery of assembly code to people who want to understand what Nessus is telling them about their network to people who’re just curious about these magic boxes of thinking sand and electricity.

We also want to welcome others that hover around the edges: the lawyers, the spooks, policy wonks, web developers, auditors, communicators, and the like.

Kawaiicon aims to have speakers on a diverse range of topics, because we know y’all are going to hallway con it for a bit. We’ll try to have talks ranging from off the continental shelf depths of technical arcanery, to the warm paddling pool of interesting infosec niches.

This year, like every time we’ll aim to fill up the Michael Fowler Centre with 2100 people or so. Fifty-or-so amazing speakers, as well as a CTF, lockpick village, Kuracon for the little ones, and a whole bunch of other stuff that’ll go up on the website when it’s ready.

Previous Cons

Credits

Kawaiicon is brought to you by The Kawaiicon Crüe, our selfless volunteers, everyone else we elbowed into helping, and fat sponsors cash.

Code of Conduct

We have a code of conduct. We enforce our code of conduct. But not with robots. Yet.