It is with a heavy heart that we are canceling this year’s conference scheduled for October 19th 2024.
What Happened?
A few things. First, we’ve lost three of our six board members this year due to job and life changes, two of which just in the last week. This close to a conference there is too much to do to also seek and select replacements and get them up to speed. If we had tried, both board member selection and conference planning would have suffered.
While we had a number of confirmed sponsors, we were also below our fundraising targets to deliver a conference we feel would be worthy of your time and investment in attending. Several of us are already out of pocket to support these goals, but that isn’t sustainable, and we were quickly approaching cutoff dates that would have incured additional costs.
Lastly, we did consider postponement, but this would put us into the holiday season, and impacted availability of several vendors, which would have put us further behind in (re)planning.
Is there any good news?
Yes! We are still partnered with Ingenuity Cleveland as our venue and have a confirmed date of October 18th, 2025 with deposit in place. We hope to see continued support from our sponsors, and will be returning with even more features everywhere we can.
We have also formed a new 501c3 non-profit organization under the name BSides Cleveland, established our bank account, and our controlling documents. Not only do these help us move things forward and establish ourselves, but they are one-time efforts that are already behind us.
What will happen with my tickets?
We have already requested all sales from EventBrite to be refunded (this includes shirt orders). No further action is needed on your part.
Can I help with anything?
Absolutely. Like/share/follow our socials (listed below) so it’s easier for us to reach everyone, and join our discord server so we can have more interaction outside of the conference. General donations are always helpful, and encourage your employers to become sponsors* – sponsor support is critical, and has been increasingly difficult to gather with industry contraction and economic concerns.
Your feedback also has impact – survey results contributed to our venue selection, change of conference month, and new features we still want to keep as a surprise, so bring more thoughts to our discord.
*2024 Sponsor page as reference material, we will publish a new page for 2025 soon. Email sponsors@bsidescle.com in the meantime if interested.
I’ll be a board member!
Love the interest! We will post a formal invitation soon with more information.
Lastly, Thank You!
Thank you to everyone who has been supporting our return, our past board members, those who provided feedback to help us come back even better, everyone who volunteered to help, and the sponsors listed below. This was a painful decision after significant investment of time and effort, and we hope to see you October 18th 2025.
Fortress, Infraguard Alliance, MetaCTF, PentesterLab, ZenGRC, Jolly Scholar