Call for Participation

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Tēnā koutou katoa, internet friends and interested bystanders! Kawaiicon is back for 2026, which means we’re gonna need some speakers if we want to have a conference - this might mean you!

Our CFP is hereby open, and will wait patiently and expectantly from now until we close it at midnight on the Friday 7th of August, NZST. Just to remind you, this year the ‘con is running on Friday the 30th and Saturday the 31st of October.

If you haven’t heard of us before, then check out some of our talks from last year, but if you have then you’ll be a bit more familiar with the type of talks and activities that we try to feature at the ‘con. Maybe some of you have ideas already, and that’s fantastic, but if not here’s a handy list for the sort of thing we’re looking for:

  • content that shows new thinking or research or techniques
  • content that people can use or action
  • presenter who we can trust on stage in front of a metric buttload of people to follow the code of conduct and deliver a good talk
  • a presenter who has worked or contributed to the talk topic so they are pretty credible
  • a talk that is entertaining and witty
  • a good balance of content across the different areas of infosec and avoiding any duplicates
  • shorter talk windows for those who are newer to speaking or are covering well-talked about content

We’re not going to reject your talk if it uses AI, but we’re conscious that we put this conference together because we want people to learn things about infosec, not because we want people to outsource that learning to a bot to ask it what they should think or do about infosec.

If you think you might have something but you’re not sure, email us at kiwicon@kiwicon.org and we’ll help you sort it out. This might be a CFP, but if you have any other ideas - like running an event in the Renouf, or anything else you want to help make happen, just ask! We are not as scary as we look! Usually we’ve had more sleep!

Now that’s out of the way, click through for the nitty gritty of making a submission:

Submit to the CFP (ﾉ≧∀≦)ﾉ ✧