The unreasonable cost of conference presentation

The day before I was due to give the talk, I still couldn’t find the story I wanted to tell.

I worked hard on this one for weeks beforehand. I felt like it had huge potential, but also high danger - it had to be entirely about me and therefore undeniable, yet not at all about me and therefore impossible to dismiss. I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t figure out how to say it.

So I went for a long walk and watched a couple of talks with similar themes. I got back around midday and threw the entire thing away and started over. At 4am I had finished writing and testing it and crashed out, exhausted, nervous but happy.

I delivered it the next day at Everything Open 2026, and I nailed it. It’s easily the finest presentation I have ever given. I knew this the moment I stopped talking; sometimes you do a thing and you just know.

The feedback I got confirmed it. Donna Benjamin, a legend of the Australian open-source community and a person I greatly respect, told me “well done, that was so important”. Emma Davidson, a former member of the ACT parliament and now working improving diversity in technology education told me she had missed it, but multiple people had mentioned it to her and she was looking forward to seeing the video.

It’s July now. The video still isn’t available.

The talk was called The unreasonable cost of open source contribution.

At the start of 2023, I switched from being a salaried employee where conference travel is a standard perk, to a freelance open-source programmer where anything you can’t bill to a customer comes out of your own pocket. Conference attendance is suddenly very expensive: all the standard things like flights, accommodation, entry and meals, but also lost income for every hour you’re not billing.

But, I’m working in open source, so being at the open source conferences is important - it’s where my colleagues are now, and where we get the human contact and conversation. So if I must go, I should be presenting too, which increases my profile that I can then trade on for attracting clients. It helps that presenters usually get free entry, and often get travel and accommodation assistance, helping to defray costs.

There’s a catch though. Prospective clients are almost never in the room. In fact, the room is a rounding error compared to the entire addressable open source community. So the video of the presentation is critical - without it, I have nothing to show for the work I put in. Building and delivering a talk is an enormous amount of work. That work is not optional. My audience have chosen to spend their time on me rather than seeing a different speaker or being somewhere else entirely. That choice should be rewarded with something unique that they could not have got anywhere else. Creating that for them takes time, and that time comes out of my own pocket.

AsiaBSDCon 2024 was the first conference I went to at my own expense. Both talks I proposed were accepted, and travel and accommodation assistance were promised. Sadly, it took over a year and a lot of effort from multiple people to get this money reimbursed, and the videos from the entire conference have never been released. The whole experience was as surprising as it was frustrating. I’m someone who’d rather trust and occasionally get burned, and I had assumed that a form of the open source social contract would hold - we are a community, and we will take care of each other. Instead, I was forced to conclude that when my livelihood is on the line, I need to pay more attention to where I say “yes”.

BSDCan 2024, by contrast, was the gold standard. Again, both my talks were accepted and again, travel and accommodation assistance were promised. This time though, videos and reimbursement happened within a week. I was a little uncertain at the outset, but by this time I had better contacts within the community and chose to trust them, and that was not misplaced. This was a fantastic conference and I met some wonderful people there, some of whom I now count as friends. It’s a very “human” conference, well worth a visit if you’ve never attended, because you’ll find multiple people rushing to welcome you and open doors for you. For our purposes, the bar is set fairly low: fulfill your commitments to your speakers in a timely fashion. You don’t have to leave Earth’s atmosphere to clear it; BSDCan just chooses to.

And then there was the OpenZFS 2025 User & Developer Summit. With organisation by some of the BSDCan team, including the A/V team, I had no doubt they’d get the basics right. This one was different though, because I was attending remotely. As a rule, I have never liked remote conferences because I struggle to engage with anything that does not have some physicality to it. The A/V team had it covered though, finding creative ways to bring me and other remote attendees into the room at every opportunity (even setting up a private “phone booth” to allow one-on-one conversations). As a “summit” rather than a traditional conference, the format is more focused on “round-table” discussions so I did not present as such, but the A/V setup made it possible to join those conversations in realtime.

The story here though is what video can do in the hands of experts that care. A couple of weeks after the summit, I received an email from an attendee who had been there, asking if I was serious about some of the stuff I said I’d like to do in one of the discussions. We traded emails over the next couple of months, which led to a job offer. I accepted it and for the last few months I’ve had the best of both worlds - still working on open source, but with regular salary instead of the cost and uncertainty of freelancing.

This underscores the importance of video for conference events - you never know who is watching, and you never know what opportunities will come from it.

I had plans for the EO2026 talk beyond the room. Open source sustainability was a live conversation at the start of 2026, and I’d been thinking about how my experience could contribute to it. Discussing the real human cost of open source as opposed to funding abstractions was something I wasn’t seeing. I had a follow-up blog post drafted with connections to other talks and how I thought it all fit together. But without the video, I didn’t have enough to work with. It may yet appear, but I feel like the moment has passed, or perhaps that I am no longer close enough to it.

This was also a talk about family, and specifically my family. My children are now young adults. They’ve spent their lives watching me type at a computer while enjoying a warm and comfortable home. I know they’ve never really understood the connection between those things, or even that they’re connected at all.

When I submitted the talk, I wrote in the abstract that if forced to choose between supporting my family and working in open source, I choose my family every time. This talk was where I said out loud, in front of people, that I choose them and what that means. This talk was where I connected all those pieces together in a way that is not really about the computers at all. This talk was for them.

Putting on a conference is hard. I know people involved in it; I see the lost sleep, the calls, the endless sponsorship drives, the calls for volunteers, all of it. I get that it’s tough and often thankless work, and the last thing I want to do is place additional burden on them by asking for one more thing.

The thing is, I’m not asking for perfection, and I’m not even really asking for speed. What I’m asking for is honesty. Your speakers are on your side. They’re invested in the success of your conference. They’ve offered to speak. They want to be there, and they know why they want to be there. So tell them up front about the video plan, the reimbursement plan, and anything else about the commitments you’re making to them. If it’s going to be slow, tell them. If the plans change, tell them.

Give your speakers the information they need to decide what they can afford. Because if you’d told me upfront, I would have made a different choice.