Contributing in New Ways

My personal challenge for 2024: I believe that contributing to communities in new, courageous ways will add value to the communities I'm part of and grow my own knowledge and skills. Follow the links to see how it went.


Blog Posts


Courageous Community Contributions

These are the TL;DR descriptions of the endeavors I've worked on during the year. To learn more about each, check out my reflections on closing this personal challenge.

  • Launch an open space security conference together with Claudius Link, Dave van Stein, Janina Nemec, and Ulrich Viefhaus. The Open Security Conference (#osco) took place on 4-6 October 2024 in Rückersbach, near Frankfurt/Main in Germany. It's people-centered international gathering for everyone interested in cybersecurity, aiming to remove gatekeeping and barriers where we can to make security more accessible. The event was an open space conference with the addition of two keynotes to kick it off. Read for yourself how the first osco went! Check out our website, follow us on social media, Mastodon and LinkedIn, and save the dates for #osco25 on 2-5 October 2025!
  • Create a security card game together with Martin Schmidt and Philipp Zug. This idea had its origins at SoCraTes 2023. We created the main concept, a constantly evolving set of rules and deck of cards. Thanks to Martin, we also have a way to play remotely; who knows if we'll also turn it into a physical card deck at some point. In any case, we hope to bring it to open space conferences and the world - and already started doing so at SoCraTes 2024. Check out our Security Card Game Github org, and make sure to read Martin's SecCardGame post to get a first impression of the game.
  • Build a full-stack open-source practice platform as an ensemble with Ben Dowen and Vernon Richards. We were taking the roles of the employees of the fictive company "Make-Believe Labs", taking on "Project Snack Shop" for a customer who wants to digitalize their well-running snack shop business by offering an online shop. This was intended as an as realistic as possible practice platform for all kinds of development activities. From our own vision, to the actual project offer and context, to the first proof of concepts, to team agreements, to design documents, to architectural decision records, exploring walking skeleton options with code, and more. Not everything is publicly shared, but you can check out our main Snack Shop repository.
  • Offer Shiva Krishnan's and my leadership workshop series to the community. This program proved to be valuable to lots of people in the past, and it definitely helped both us grow immensely. Finally, the time had come to spread the word further and transform our workshops to an open community offer. This year we wanted to try it out with a small cohort. For this first community proof of concept we built on our networks and gathered a first small cohort we started the first workshop series with. If all goes well, there are plans for more afterwards.
  • Give conference sessions on security. Ever since I've had my first pair testing sessions on security in 2018 I've been diving deeper into the area each year. I've given several sessions in company settings and at open spaces. This year it was time to extend my conference speaking to security topics and hence contribute in new ways in that space as well. And it's been working out! Four different security-focused sessions got accepted at four different conferences in 2024, check out my speaking engagements overview.

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