USENIX WOOT is the academic equivalent of Black Hat or CanSec. It's a software security conference with a special focus on "offensive" security: vulnerability research, exploit development, and technology failures that lead to those things.
If you were going to summarize the point of WOOT in one sentence: it's an effort to cross-pollinate academic research with industry research that works by getting the kind of work that would normally be submitted to Black Hat, CanSec, Defcon, RECON, and ShmooCon and also getting it into the academic cite record.
I'm trying to get WOOT to do a better job of engaging the open source and startup communities.
WOOT does a pretty good job of getting contributions from the "software security industry" (consultancies, security product companies, security research labs). But more and more interesting and relevant work is being done in the context of small projects. If you've built, say, a website that processes financial transactions, and had to build up countermeasures for fraud that's work that's relevant to WOOT, and WOOT is interested in publishing it. If you've build a NoSQL database and had to come up with a threat model to deal with new kinds of injection attacks, or to deal with malicious cluster nodes: totally WOOT-worthy. As long as the work focuses on the "attacker" side of the security problem, it's relevant to us.
You don't need to write a paper to submit! We're interested in outlines and sketches of work, and will help you turn that work into a paper. You don't have to write speculatively for us.
WOOT is relatively high profile. An accepted WOOT paper is a meaningful contribution to the academic literature. We'd like to see more of it come from the kinds of people who contribute to HN.
The proceedings from the previous 8 years of WOOT are available online. Check out last year's, which includes (for instance) some pretty great work from Dan Boneh, Grant Ho, Niels Provos and Lucas Ballard:
https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot14/workshop-program
Happy to answer questions!