Exploratory draft v2.2 · web reading edition
How authority is constructed in cybersecurity conference biographies
Question and scope
A biography offers public reasons to listen to a person: positions, affiliations, publications, findings, projects, or awards. We examine how those reasons are selected and connected in official biographies. ‘Construction’ names the composition of an argument in a document; it does not assume authorship, editorial intention, or reception.
Corpus and reading
We examined 53 biographies from five 2024 events selected to contrast formats and lengths. Each record retains its participation, edition, and official URL. Reading is limited to the bio field. The eight-family instrument organizes signals, but a category does not replace its supporting sentence.
Observed mechanisms
Illustrative bios show credential accumulation, narrated careers, concrete works or outcomes, community belonging, and public commitment. These may coexist in one bio. Order of verbs and examples matters: a role may open a bio with a project supporting it, or a work may come first followed by an affiliation.
Format and limits
Each programme's architecture determines what becomes available. A long biography and an authorship listing do not offer the same information. The RSAC addendum and USENIX's single comparable bio restrict comparisons across events. The examples are not a closed qualitative sample and do not support prevalence claims.
Provisional conclusion
Published authority is articulated through the selection and sequence of roles, careers, works, belonging, and causes. The codebook helps locate resources, but one bio's link between accessibility and activism shows its families cannot exhaust every argument. Future expansion must preserve contrary cases and review documentary coverage before generalizing.
Instrument diagnostic, not validation
Four AI annotators applied the eight families to 53 biographies. Agreement among outputs describes stability in this corpus. It measures neither accuracy nor semantic validity nor reliability against a human reference; there was no human adjudication of these outputs. Interfaces and execution dates differed.