We just decided to do it: bringing BSides Maine to life

BSides Maine is officially in the books, and I am still trying to fully process it. After months of planning, building, coordinating, designing, and solving one problem after another, Maine's first BSides actually happened.

For a first-year conference, the response floored us. We had more than 50 talk submissions, 260 registered attendees, and a waitlist of around 100 people who wanted in but couldn't fit. The feedback has been overwhelming in the best way: people were kind, people had fun, the talks were excellent, and the hallway conversations went somewhere real. Folks who have been to BSides events all over the world told us they were surprised by the quality, the organization, and the energy of a first-year con.

Here's the part I still can't quite believe: this was the first conference I had ever helped bring into existence. Not the first I'd attended, and not the first I'd volunteered at, but the first I'd helped shepherd from a long-running "someday" into a real place where people could gather. And BSides was never ours to own. An event like this belongs to the community that shows up and gives it life. We were simply its stewards: the people willing to gather the crew, do the paperwork, open the doors, and give the idea a home in Maine.

Hackers around here had talked about doing a con in Maine for years, and it was always a someday. Eventually someday ran out, so a few of us decided to Field of Dreams it, build the space and trust that the people would come. A lot of that nerve came from the BSides down in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I went in hoping their lead would hand me a roadmap, some detailed step-by-step guide to starting a conference, and what I got instead was permission. His advice boiled down to one thing: if you want to do it, you just have to lean in and do it. So we did. I started a group chat, made a logo, and said, "Let's do this. If you BSides Maine, they will come." Then I gathered the best people I could think of, the ones I knew would care about what this could become, and we started building.

First, there was paperwork

Before there was a conference, there was a nonprofit. We stood up DirigoSec for real, with real bylaws, a real bank account, real filings, and real responsibility. Signing your name to all of that is a genuinely strange feeling, because overnight you go from "person throwing an event" to "person legally and financially on the hook if the whole thing goes sideways." It turns out that building the world you want to see involves an incredible amount of paperwork.

Then came the venue, the sponsors, the speakers, the volunteers, the badges, the activities, the schedules, and the thousand tiny decisions nobody attending a conference should ever have to notice. Every answer uncovered three more questions, and every solved problem revealed another one waiting behind it. Eventually there was nothing left to do but open the doors. People came.

Then I looked up

At one point during the event, I looked across the room and saw a cluster of people hunched over the badges. Heads together, tools out, laptops open, deep in the CTF and prying the thing apart to see how it worked. Most of them had walked in that morning not knowing a soul. The badge was just the excuse, a reason to pull up a chair next to a stranger and ask what they had figured out so far. By the time I looked over, they weren't strangers anymore.

That was the moment, and it was the whole reason. You can plan talks and order supplies. You can make schedules, sell tickets, and spend months worrying about everything that could go wrong. But you cannot manufacture the moment when a group of strangers becomes a community over a circuit board. You can only build the space, prop the doors open, and hope people fill it. They did.

We built it together

I did not white-knuckle this conference into existence by myself. I had a crew, and they were incredible. Hawk ran operations and kept the whole machine moving. Ben ran speaker operations and made sure everyone stepping onto a stage had what they needed. Abhi wrangled the volunteers, which is its own kind of heroism. Ryan Boutot owned the badge and the activities, and those electronic badges gave BSides Maine its own identity from day one. Jim gave me solid, steadying advice exactly when I needed it. And Mark jumped in on the badge lift when it counted. I could not have gotten through this without them, and every one of them made the hard parts survivable and the good parts better.

The same goes for every speaker, sponsor, volunteer, and community partner who saw something that needed doing and stepped in to help. BSides Maine started with a group chat and a logo, but it became real because a community chose to build it with us.

Why we're doing it again

Here is the belief underneath all of it: Maine deserves a hacker con that celebrates security at the practitioner level, not just the C-suite. A place for the people actually doing the work, the ones with their hands on keyboards and soldering irons, not only the people presenting quarterly slides about them. That conviction is worth a lot of lost sleep.

We put ourselves through the stress because of what the payoff actually looks like: candid conversations that go somewhere real, selfies with people who were internet strangers an hour earlier, folks huddled in corners chewing on a badge challenge, and people making new friends and finally feeling connected to others who are curious, technical, and a little obsessed with using technology in ways it was never meant to be used. That is what a conference is supposed to create.

Like a lot of organizers, I didn't get to see every talk or have every conversation I wanted. So seeing the photos, the messages, and the reactions afterward has been genuinely moving. It turns out building the world you want to see is a lot less glamorous than it sounds. It is more paperwork, more panic, and more staring at spreadsheets than anyone puts in the inspirational version. And every so often, it looks like a few strangers reverse-engineering an electronic badge in a quiet corner between talks while it rains.

So to everyone who attended, volunteered, spoke, sponsored, organized, helped, encouraged, tested badges, answered and asked questions, moved boxes, shared posts, and gave feedback: thank you. You made the day bigger than just a conference. You are the conference. The BSides Maine team builds the space and holds the doors open, and you are the ones who step through and make it real.

We'll see you next year. We'll be the ones worrying in the corner, and loving every second of it.

Thank you for helping us send the signal through the fog. ❤️

-Marbaṩ