Keynote @ FOSS4G NA 2023

12 Dec 2023

Preparing the keynote for FOSS4G North America this year felt particularly difficult. I certainly sweated over it.

• Audience was a problem. I wanted to talk about my usual thing, business models and economics, but the audience was going to be a mash of people new to the topic and people who has seen my spiel multiple times.
• Length was a problem. Out of an excess of faith in my abilities, the organizers gave me a full hour long slot! That is a very long time to keep people’s attention and try to provide something interesting.

The way it all ended up was:

• Cadging some older content from keynotes about business models, to bring new folks up to speed.
• Mixing in some only slightly older content about cloud models.
• Adding in some new thoughts about the way everyone can work together to make open source more sustainable (or at least less extractive) over the long term.

Here’s this year’s iteration.

The production of this kind of content is involved. The goal is to remain interesting over a relatively long period of time.

I have become increasingly opinionated about how to do that.

• No freestyling. Blathering over bullet points is unfair to your audience. The aggregate time of an audience of 400 is very large. 5 minutes of your “um” and “ah” translates into 33 hours of dead audience time.
• Get right to it. No mini-resume, no talking about your employer (unless you are really sneaky about it, like me 😉), this is about delivering ideas and facts that are relevant to the audience. Your introducer can handle your bona fides.
• Have good content. The hardest part! (?) Do you have something thematic you can bookend the start and end with? Are there some interesting facts that much of the audience does not know yet? Are there some unappreciated implications? This is, presumably, why you were asked to keynote, so hopefully not too, too hard. This is the part that I worry over the most, because I really have no faith that what I have to say is actually going be interesting to an audience, no matter how much I gussy it up.
• Work from a text. The way to avoid blather is to know exactly what you are going to say. At 140 words-per-minute speaking pace, a 55 minute talk is 7700 words, which coincidentally (not) is exactly how long my keynote text is.
• Write a speech, not an article. You will have to say all those words! Avoid complicated sentence constructions. Keep sentences short. Take advantage of parallel constructions to make a point, drive a narrative, force a conclusion. (see?) Repeat yourself. Repeat yourself.
• Perform, don’t read. Practice reading out loud. Get used to leaving longer gaps and get comfortable with silence. Practice modulating your voice. Louder, softer. Faster, slower. Drop. The. Hammer. Watch a gifted speaker like Barack Obama deliver a text. He isn’t ad libbing, he’s performing a prepared text. See what he does to make that sound spontaneous and interesting.
• Visuals as complements, not copies. Your slides should complement and amplify your content, not recapitulate it. In the limit, you could do all-text slides, which just give the three-word summary of your current main point. (This classic Lessig talk is my favourite example.)
• Visuals as extra channel. Keep changing up the visual. Use the slide notes space to get a feel for how long each slide should be up. (Hint, about 50 words on average.) Keeping slide duration low also helps in terms of using the per-slide speaker notes as low-end teleprompter (increase notes font size! reduce slide preview size!) from which you deliver your performance.

I originally started scripting talks because it allowed me to smooth out the quality of my talks. With a script, it wasn’t a crapshoot whether I had a good ad lib delivery or a bad one, I had a nice consistent level. From there, leveraging up to take advantage of the format to increase the talk quality was a natural step. Speakers like Lessig and Damian Conway remain my guide posts.

If you liked the keynote video and want to use the materials, the slides are available here under CC BY.