First, and most challenging, there has become substantial competition with other conferences. se can't seem to not conflict with BSides Raleigh (even after attempts to coordinate with leadership there). Additionally, BSidesNOVA, BSides Greenville, BSides Augusta, BSides Charleston, and many other corporate focused conferences are all set to take place at nearly the pace of about one conference per weekend in the region throughout the fall. That's a lot. While we believe that BSides Charlotte provides a unique value to the local Charlotte community, we are also thankful for the substantial regional participation that we have as well!

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We believe we know why this happened: COVID caused most conferences to consider, and often execute, a shift to running in the fall for 2020 because we all hoped that things would be better by then. This obviously wasn't the case, but the conference dates never really shifted back and other conferences have been added to the calendar, as well.

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Next, and most important, it's broader than simply the conferences taking place all within a few months. It's forcing attendees to either go through really serious efforts to attend multiple conferences so close to one another or make a decision on which conferences not to attend.

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Further on this, we're competing a bit for volunteers. Several of our volunteers enjoy attending and volunteering at several of the other BSides events in the region. We LOVE this and really enjoy that they are able to do this. However, it is EXTREMELY hard on them to, in some cases, attend a conference the day before our conference, miss the staff event the night before, and be expected to help, bright and early, the morning of BSides Charlotte. Not to mention the safety risk of some of those people driving in late after a long conference day elsewhere.

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Also important, sponsorship dollars, within the same sales region - and even nationally to some extent. We're competing with the other conferences for a lot of the same resources to put on our various conferences. Those resources are a bit easier to come by when conferences are not so close to one another.

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Finally, and just as important, we're also, to some extent, competing for speakers and talks and run the risk of a lot of overlap in presentations (which are awesome, don't get us wrong) between the mix of these conferences. This is, in some ways, a good thing because it gives people an opportunity to see a presentation they may have missed but most BSides conferences record and make available the talks during or after the conference as well, limiting this type of value.

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Now you're probably asking: By making this move, what does that mean? How does this make things better?

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First and most clear, we stop conflicting with other local and (close by) regional conferences, so hopefully we can stop (even though we keep failing) having to negotiate out dates that we will run.

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Next, we make it a little easier (we hope) for sponsors to help support the conference and our vision of providing a stable, year-over-year, community focused conference that is affordable and attend-able for Charlotte and the greater region.

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And, we open some options from a venue standpoint, as this grants us the flexibility to ensure that venues that have the right size to accommodate us can host us; we will be able to do this by these venues letting us know what dates they have available and we can then pick what works best for us.

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Furthermore, we're looking to step up our badge game! If you have seen the preliminary badge picture on our Discord, you might understand why. We're really excited about this and this move also gives us a little more time to work on that.

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Finally, it gives us an opportunity to continue to plan for the new conference dates, but also allows us to pivot efforts to a community-based event we've talked about with several key associations, organizations, and community partners that we think will be nothing short of an AMAZING opportunity for the local Charlotte (and surrounding) cybersecurity community. We're planning this event to be held towards the end of this year. We'll be announcing more details on this soon!

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We truly hope that this will be a move that everyone in the community will benefit from and we look forward to your continued involvement and support of the community for our event-in-planning at the end of the year and the re-scheduled BSides Charlotte 2025!

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~BSides Charlotte Board