Who Should Submit?
We are looking for new presentations and policy roundtable topics, however, work that has been or will be presented at an excellent conference that would otherwise be missed by most of the DistrictCon community is also welcome. We especially encourage new presenters to submit talks!

Conference Format
DistrictCon has a number of hands-on events and contests running in parallel to our on-stage talk tracks. We will have two spaces for our on-stage talks this year: our larger audience venue on the Main Stage and DisCo After Dark, which will host talks in a more intimate setting and is suitable for talks with more audience engagement, lighting talks, or talks with more sensitive content. Policy roundtable discussions will be held on a separate track.

On Stage: Hacking Magic: technical offensive or defensive topics
Talk Duration: 20 or 50 minutes including Q&A

Presenters are encouraged to show demonstrations of techniques, working code, hardware projects, or other items that you personally developed and that are open-source and released to the public. This will help the community get the most from your presentation.

In your submission please note what you are releasing or, if you are not releasing something, why the findings or techniques you're presenting provide value independently.

On Stage: Informing Policy: 1-2 talks for exceptional policy research
DistrictCon, in the spirit of engaging with the wider DC area, will also be accepting a very limited number of talks on the main stage for exceptional policy research or policy content that directly engages the hacker community.

Hackers do not enjoy being read talking points so we are looking for the spiciest content that will resonate with DistrictCon participants. Original research or projects on cyber security in the policy arena will be considered: feel free to read the term policy broadly to include impacts on people and communities, not just government-type work.

Policy Roundtables: Compelling ideas for lively roundtable discussions at the intersection of cybersecurity and policy.

This format runs in reverse. Every other format at DistrictCon puts an expert on stage to teach the room. Policy Roundtables flip that. The expertise sits in the audience, hackers, researchers, and practitioners, and the person who submits is the moderator whose job is to draw it out. You bring the questions; the room brings the answers. You frame a topic, ask sharp questions, and listen. A roundtable succeeds when the moderator walks away having learned more than they taught.

Who this is for:

• Government and industry policymakers and civil-society researchers who want to hear directly from the hacker community on a specific security-policy question. If there's an issue you'd love to put in front of a room full of technical experts, this is your format.
• If you're a technical expert: your knowledge is what these sessions run on, but here you bring it from a seat in the room, not from the podium. Submitting a roundtable means signing up to moderate and learn, not to present your work. If you're looking to share technical findings from the stage, DistrictCon's other formats are the right home for that.

Not a clean fit but have a great idea anyway? Submit it, we accept a limited number of roundtables from outside this description. 

What makes a strong submission? Narrow and spicy. The best roundtables zero in on one specific, contestable question and go deep, rather than surveying a broad theme. We want discussions that directly engage the hacker community: cybersecurity policy conversations for hackers, facilitated by hackers. Offensive, defensive, legal, policymaking, governance, and geopolitical angles are all welcome.

If your roundtable is accepted. You'll work with the DistrictCon policy team in the months before the conference to curate and sharpen your discussion questions. On the day, you'll co-moderate alongside a DistrictCon organizer: you shape the questions and lead the conversation, and they help keep it running. This is a live, interactive discussion with the room, not a presentation slot.

Policy Roundtable Logistics:

• Duration: 75 or 90 minutes (at organizers' discretion, based on scheduling)
• One moderator per submission, listed as the "speaker" in the submission system. We can't accept submissions with more than one at this time.
• These discussions will not be video recorded.
• Attribution for each roundtable is set by DistrictCon organizers before the conference. If you have a strong preference based on your topic and professional background, note it in your submission.

Other tracks: In addition to submitting a talk please also remember to consider participating in our other tracks such as the Junkyard End-of-Life Pwnathon! 

Some Ideas for Topics:
These are not exhaustive lists but are meant to indicate some items we think would be of interest. Keep in mind that the other tracks listed above are great places for a broad variety of other content, including 0-days!

On Stage: Hacking Magic:

• Bizarre Reverse Engineering side projects
• Exploits and Vulnerabilities
• Tool-release talks (we want to hear about why you made it and its impact)
• Security automation tools that provide defenders asymmetric advantage via open-source tooling and data
• Novel ways to cluster and track threat groups, information operations and/or disinformation

On Stage: Informing Policy:

• Openly gathered intelligence with policy consequences that impact cyber security
• Actionable insights to protect marginalized communities in cyberspace

Policy Roundtable:

• Policy and ethical implications of specific emerging security techniques 
• Specific policy changes or considerations that impact cybersecurity
• Geopolitical factors or legal frameworks that impact cyberspace
• Security and policy considerations for emerging cyber-physical systems
• Governance and cooperation challenges in existing cybersecurity investigations and operations

We will politely decline talks and policy roundtable topics that are primers on well-known technologies, vendor pitches, or refactors of old talks (except if they were recently presented in a venue that most DistrictCon attendees would not have been able to consume).

If you aren’t sure if your talk fits, submit it anyway! We’d love to see it and discuss it with you.

A very limited number of On Stage: Hacking Magic talks will be afforded the opportunity to offer a hands on session after their talk for community members looking to try out techniques and learn from you more. In the CFP select if you are interested in offering one.