OWASP New Zealand Day 2011 Wrap-up

(from Nick Freeman & Scott Bell)

Dear OWASP Leaders,

This email is a brief wrap-up of how the OWASP New Zealand Day 2011 conference went on Thursday July 7.

The conference was a great success, with a 33% increase in attendance from previous years. We had just over 200 people attend our single track, 10 talk conference and two training sessions.

This shows a growing interest in web application security in New Zealand, and we will be pushing the attendees to attend chapter meetings and spread the word about OWASP with their friends, colleagues and other industry groups. We have had a great response from a number of development groups who are interested in having OWASP content presented at their meetings, which we see as an excellent opportunity to expand the OWASP community and web application security awareness in New Zealand.

Feedback from conference attendees has been glowing, with very positive comments and some constructive suggestions. We are still dissecting it all, and will be combining the feedback with our own learnt lessons to ensure future chapter meetings and OWASP NZ Day conferences get better and better.

We'd like to give a very big thanks to Kate Hartmann, Sarah Baso, Mark Bristow, Alison Shrader and everyone else who has helped us organise the conference and make it the success that it was. Special thanks also go out to Roberto Suggi Liverani, previous OWASP NZ Chapter Leader, who organised the previous two OWASP day conferences and has helped OWASP New Zealand grow to its current size.

Final thanks go to our sponsors; The University of Auckland Business School, Security-Assessment.com, Lateral Security, F5 and Aura Information Security. Their generous donations allowed us to keep OWASP New Zealand Day a free conference in an excellent venue with quality catering.

Most content from the conference is already posted on the OWASP New Zealand Day 2011 conference wiki page (https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_New_Zealand_Day_2011) - we will be uploading the remaining content in the next day or two. In the mean time, a celebratory whisky or two is in order :)

Kind Regards

Nick Freeman & Scott Bell

OWASP New Zealand Chapter Leaders