FOSDEM15

Looking for something to do the evening before FOSDEM?

Like every year, many FOSDEM attendees are planning to enjoy some beers at the Delirium Café, in a beautiful alley near the Grand Place in Brussels. We have reserved most of the bar (most of the alley in fact!) again this year.

Come and join us next Friday, 30 January, from 17:00(ish).

Read the beer event page for all the details!

If the beer event is very busy or if you would like dinner before heading over (Delirium Café does not serve food), a number of other events are on. These are just the ones we know about (check the fosdem@ mailing list for more announcements):

So far:

• The Software Freedom Conservancy is organising a dinner nearby (tickets cheaper when bought in advance).

Alternatively there are plenty of local restaurants within ten minutes walk of the Delirium—you can't miss them!

See you there!

PS: Drink wisely. Belgian beers are stronger than you might be used to. :-)

With just over a week to go until FOSDEM 2015, Our main tracks schedule is now complete.

We are proud to announce the following talks:

We are pleased to announce a fourth round of interviews with some of our main track speakers:

• Alex Bradbury: lowRISC: The path to an open-source SoC
• Federico Vaga and Matthieu Cattin: A GPS watch made of free software and hardware
• Harlan Stenn: NTF's General Timestamp API and Library: Current timestamps suck. We can do much better
• Martin Burnicki: Technical Aspects of Leap Second Propagation and Evaluation
• Pepijn Noltes: Modularizing C software with Apache Celix
• Steve Klabnik: The story of Rust

Our interviews page is already filling up nicely with a diverse set of main track speakers. Next week we'll publish the last set of interviews. Only 10 days until FOSDEM 2015 kicks off!

Get a sneak peek of FOSDEM 2015 in our third round of interviews with some main track speakers:

• Benjamin Berg: SDAPS: Surveying Made Easy
• Gilles Van Assche, Joan Daemen and Michaël Peeters: Keccak and SHA-3: code and standard updates
• Jonas Öberg: Automating Attribution: Giving credit where credit is due
• Till Tantau: Algorithmic Graph Drawing in TikZ
• Yorik van Havre: FreeCAD: a hackable design platform

You can find our complete set of interviews on our interviews page, showing the diversity of our main track speakers: about languages, performance, time, typesetting, hardware, security and much more. Stay tuned for more food for thought next week.

With FOSDEM just around the corner, it is time for us to enlist your 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 the 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;
• Regulating audio levels;

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.

We are pleased to announce a second round of confirmed presentations.

There is more to come as we are still reviewing a number of proposals.