I have not really had the luxury of choosing bosses that think my way. So it was a matter of showing Them that They wanted me to go to the Perl Conferences (and maybe the Usenix Tech Conference as well. I am still working on that one.)

The day after I started work in January, I put in a vacation request for the days around the Conference, on the grounds that if I passed my six-month probation, I'd have enough accrued vacation to take the last ten days of July off. It was approved, I passed probation, and I went, on my own nickel.

When I got back, I wrote up a formal trip-report: what tutorials and sessions I had taken, with a couple of salient bullet points for each one listing what I had learned; what hall-way conversations I was involved in; the vender presentations I took (again with bullet points); BOF sessions (ditto). I sent the draft off to my boss for approval, and then published it to the company at large.

I took the three most useful points and started applying them to my work. When next January rolled around, I put in my vacation request. I was able to demonstrate to my boss that there had been a measurable benefit from my previous conference attendence. With out prompting, he offered to split the cost of the conference registration.

Repeat Performance.

The third year the company picked up the full cost of the conference, tutorials, and lodging. The accountants and I had a discussion, they wanted me to fly; I was going to ride the motorcycle, thank you, but you can pay for mileage.... I won. At that Conference I got into a hallway conversation on Monday with a couple of Apache Developers about a Serious Sore Spot my company was running into. They sent a patch from the Conference on Tuesday evening; we applied at the shop on Wednesday morning, verified that it fixed our bug, and the patch was formally submitted to the Developement Community on Friday.

Last year, all my boss had to say to the Powers That Be was 'The Apache Bug', and they approved sending up to five people to the conference and covering the cost of one tutorial each.

You have to be able to show that there is a benefit to the company in sending people off to conferences for education. Once you can quantify that benefit, you have a very strong argument with Management.

Also consider presenting; you get a discount on the Conference; the Company gets publicity to a finely targeted audience. ("There will be two thousand of the brightest Perl/Linux/Open Source Developers on the planet there...."); and the Conference gets a paper/seminar/tutorial/BOF. A win for all concerned.

Do you home-work, do your documentation, and be persistent.