fosdem.org

Time to make some statistics from the results of our FOSDEM 2011 Census !

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

As always, such statistics must be taken with the necessary and proverbial grain of salt, especially as "only" around 400 people did fill out our survey, which is only very marginal compared to the estimated amount of people who attend the event (it definitely makes up for less than 10%).

But for the love of fancy pie charts, we present them here nevertheless !

About our visitors

Their age

Where they're coming from

Note that the results for the country of origin were extremely distributed and, hence, it only made some sense to aggregate by continent. We can definitely say that, at least as far as Europe is concerned, our visitors are from all over the place!

Gender

While we have been hoping and are still hoping for the future that the percentage of female visitors and contributors raises significantly, there were "only" 4%, although that seems to be above average.

Stay

While, as mentioned above, FOSDEM is free of charge, coming to our event still represents a substantial investment in terms of travel and stay, as most visitors are not sponsored by their employer or the projects they're involved in. Well, this statistic shows that FOSDEM does something for the economy of hotels in Brussels as well ;).

Contributors

Are our visitors FOSS contributors ?

Most of them definitely are, which is not really surprising, given that FOSDEM is an event that is primarily targetted at FOSS contributors.

Have they been sent by their employer ?

A large majority of visitors came on their own budget and own their own initiative, which is also expected, and made possible due to FOSDEM being a free (as in beer) event too: no registration, no fee.

Are they paid for working on FOSS projects ?

Quite a substantial amount (around 40%) are actually paid to work on FOSS projects.

How do they contribute to FOSS ?

Note that the question was with multiple answers, which makes sense as we usually contribute in many ways.

Most are developers, which also makes sense as it is the primary target group of the event.

And most of them also work as developers.