FOSDEM14

FOSDEM is approaching fast, and we could use some helping hands!
Have some time on Friday or during the event? Then read below how you can help.

Every year, an enthusiastic band of volunteers helps us make FOSDEM a fun and safe place for all our attendees. We could not do this without you. This year we again need as many hands as possible, especially during the buildup (starting Friday at noon) and teardown (Sunday evening). No need to worry about missing lunch. Food will be provided.

If you have some spare time during weekend and would like to be a part of the team that makes FOSDEM tick:

We need help with the following:

• Setting up the venue on Friday: this mostly involves carrying tables to their destinations and setting them up, putting up signage, covering the walls in brown paper, ... in short: transform the campus into a conference venue. We need as many volunteers as possible for this task.
• Deploying the network on Friday: rolling out, neatly securing and crimping UTP cables. People with experience rolling out networks and crimping cables are very welcome!
• Manning the infodesk during the weekend: help out fellow attendees with their questions, sell t-shirts, ... . Proficiency in English is a must, but if you know other languages, it certainly wouldn't hurt.
• Heralds: briefly introduce the speakers and the topics of their talks, make sure all talks end on time by giving speakers cues near the end of their time slot. Keep an eye out on room safety and report potential issues such as overcrowded rooms before it becomes more than a "potential" issue.
• Safety: keep an eye out for hazardous situations such as patches of ice that could trip people up, overcrowded rooms, ... This also involves barring entrance to rooms that are at full capacity so we can keep the conference safe for everyone. This can be combined with moderation.
• Teardown and cleanup on Sunday evening: collecting beer bottles, tearing down the network, pulling brown paper off the walls, taking down the signage, stacking the rental tables in neat heaps, broom the floors, ... Basically, make sure we're welcome again next year. ;)

If any or all of these sound like your kind of gig, pick your task(s) at https://volunteers.fosdem.org and subscribe to the volunteers mailing list. Feel free to shout out and introduce yourself!

In addition to general volunteer work, we are also looking for volunteers specifically to help out with video-related work. This involves:

• Operating a camera in one of the many rooms which will be recorded by the FOSDEM video team;
• Regulating the audio in one of the rooms;
• or operating the DVswitch station.

While A/V experience is of course always welcome, all that's really needed is that you're interested; on-the-job training will be provided.

People interested in helping out with the video team should subscribe to the video team mailing list before the event. Important announcements will be made there, and be prepared to join us on IRC during the event.

Note that it's perfectly okay to subscribe to both. Just make sure to let the respective coordinators know when necessary.

With just over a week to go until FOSDEM 2014, Our main tracks schedule is now complete.

We are proud to announce the following talks:

Here is the third round of interviews with our main track speakers:

• Howard Chu: What's New in OpenLDAP
• Peter De Schrijver: Power management: a system wide challenge
• Timo Sirainen: Dovecot's way of scaling to millions of users
• Vesna Manojlovic: Using RIPE Atlas API for measuring IPv6 Reachability
• Wolfram Sang: Making the Linux Kernel better (without coding)

Next week we'll publish the last set of interviews. Only 10 days until FOSDEM 2014 kicks off!

If you intend to bring your non-geek partner and/or kids to FOSDEM, they may be interested in exploring Brussels while you attend the conference.

Like previous years, FOSDEM is organising sightseeing tours.

Just like previous editions, we will have two rooms for birds of a feather sessions.

The concept is simple: any project or community can reserve a timeslot (fifteen minutes to an hour), during which they have the room just to themselves.

These rooms are intended for ad-hoc discussions, meet-ups or brainstorming sessions. They are not a replacement for a developer room and they are certainly not intended for talks. The rooms are deliberately not equipped with projectors. The rooms are small and cosy. There are seats for approximately thirty people.

Reservations can be made only during the event and are on a first-come, first-served basis. The signup sheets will be at the infodesk in the H building.

We have just published the second batch of interviews with our main track speakers:

• Daniel Martí: F-Droid: Free Software app distribution for Android
• David Goulet: USE OTR or how we learned to start worrying and love cryptography
• Jeremy Bennett and Kerstin Eder: Who ate my battery?: Why free and open source systems are solving the problem of excessive energy consumption.
• Michael Dale: HTML5 Video Part Deux: New Opportunities and New Challenges
• Nuno Diegues and Torvald Riegel: Concurrent Programming Made Simple: The (r)evolution of Transactional Memory
• Philipp Wagner: OpTiMSoC: Build Your Own System-on-Chip!
• Tom Tromey: Your application versus GDB
• Wietse Venema: Postfix open source mail server - lessons learned and recent developments

If you can't wait for FOSDEM 2014, get a glimpse of the talks in these interviews. More are coming in the next two weeks. And have you already read our first set of speaker interviews?