Choose Your Own: five years of security lessons
Three conferences, five years, and one recurring format: a talk where the audience decides which route it takes. The SteelCon 2026 instalment looks back across the whole run.
Five years of security lessons delivered through Dave McKenzie's recurring choose-your-own-adventure talk format.
WATCH THE ORIGINAL (opens on an external site)Most conference talks are fixed before the speaker walks on stage. Dave's choose-your-own format is not. The audience picks the route, and the talk follows it.
He has returned to the format three times: a last-minute keynote at BSides Newcastle in 2021, a second run at Securi-Tay in 2023, and the SteelCon 2026 instalment that looks back across five years of security lessons.
How the trilogy fits together
- BSides Newcastle 2021 — the first outing, delivered as a last-minute keynote with several possible routes prepared for the audience to choose between.
- Securi-Tay 2023 — a second iteration of the same audience-led format.
- SteelCon 2026 — the latest instalment, framed as five years of security lessons drawn from the running experiment.
Start with SteelCon if you only watch one. The two earlier talks are worth it if you want to see how the format developed.
BSidesNcl 2021 - Choose Your Own Keynote Dave McKenzie
A choose-your-own keynote in which the audience determines the direction of Dave McKenzie's talk. Delivered as a last-minute keynote, with multiple possible routes prepared for the audience to choose between.
GO TO SOURCE (opens on an external site)Hey Securi-Tay 2023 - Choose Your Own Talk by David McKenzie
Another iteration of Dave McKenzie's audience-led choose-your-own talk format.
GO TO SOURCE (opens on an external site)
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